P. O. W.

By Guy Morgan and Lt. John Worsley R.N.V.R.

The fascinating account of a British Naval Officer who was captured during the Second World War and endured the prisoner of war camps of both the Fascist Italians and the Nazi Germans.



“I was captured by the Germans in a partisan fishing boat off the Dalmatian Island of Lussin on November 13, 1943. As a result of a wound then sustained I was repatriated via Sweden on September 9, 1944….

My aim throughout has been to present an accurate picture of things as they were. My motives were personal—so that I should not bore my wife with endless anecdote, so that I should be forearmed with an adequate answer to the inevitable question, “What was it like?” I knew that as soon as I returned and groped for the broken ends of the thread of my life, I should forget this strange catalepsis and, in a week or two, should find it difficult to believe these things really happened.

And, if further excuse for writing were needed, it would be that I was fortunate enough to have as friend and companion in most of these experiences Lieutenant John Worsley, R.N.V.R., Official Naval War Artist, who illustrated the book.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Braunfell Books
• Release date: Feb 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9781805231417

Book preview

cover.jpgimg1.png

© Braunfell Books 2023, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

TABLE OF CONTENTS 1

DEDICATION 4

PREFACE 5

PART ONE—FIASCO 10

November, 1943 10

Chapter One—CAPTURE AND KAFFEE 11

Chapter Two—CHINTZ AND TOMMY GUNS 18

Chapter Three—A GUINEA A BOX 34

PART TWO—IN THE BAG 46

Chapter Four—TRANSIT — December, 1943 47

Chapter Five—THE ROOM IS FEMININE — January, 1944 58

Chapter Six—TIME ON HIS HANDS — March, 1944 74

Chapter Seven—KOMMEN SIE MIT! 88

Chapter Eight—A CUP OF TEA 92

Chapter Nine—INSIDE THE SECOND FRONT 101

Chapter Ten—STAFF OF LIFE 107

Chapter Eleven—LIFE IN A NUTSHELL 114

Chapter Twelve—GLOSSARY OF GEFANGENSCHAFT 122

Chapter Thirteen—TWO TINNED PEARS — Sailors’ Return 135

P.O.W.

BY

GUY MORGAN

img2.png

This book is produced in full compliance with the government’s regulations for conserving paper and other essential materials.

DEDICATION

TO MY

WIFE AND DAUGHTER

DESPITE WHOSE STUBBORN RESISTANCE

THIS BOOK WAS FINALLY WRITTEN

PREFACE

ITALY IN THE AUTUMN OF 1943 was a nation on the run. The armistice with the Allies, announced on September 9th, had left but one desire in the minds of most Italian males; to escape from the war, from the Germans, from the Italian Fascists, and to go home. Also heading homewards among the vast throngs of Italian Army deserters were tens of thousands of their former prisoners—Albanians, Greeks, Jugoslavs, French, British Indians, Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Canadians, English, and Americans, temporarily united with their former captors in common flight from the spreading tentacles of German military occupation.

For the 70,000 Allied prisoners of war in Italian camps, many of them in their third year of captivity, the incredible had happened. Their unaccountable captors congratulated them effusively, celebrating capitulation as if it were a common victory; and pausing only to conclude a final black market deal, they changed into civilian clothes and hurried off. The gates of the camps were open and unguarded. But for the vast majority of the prisoners this liberation proved a cruel disappointment, at best providing them with three months’ summer holiday in romantic surroundings before another spell of captivity behind German wire.

It is not my business to discuss the reasons why so small a proportion of our prisoners made good their escape, or apportion blame for the tragic error of judgment, the fatal slogan Keep fit and stay put, that kept many thousands of prisoners-obediently in the vicinity of their camps, believing in Italian stories of German withdrawal and British landings further north during those precious weeks when every road railway and mountain track was crowded with fugitives and the front lines had not yet hardened. No advice could have been worse; only those who got going while the going was good got through.

We on the outside anxiously watched the thin trickle of escaping prisoners who arrived daily on foot in the strangest of disguises at the P. O. W. Stragglers’ Point in the main street of Termoli, our most northerly port on the Adriatic. Others sailed in aboard commandeered fishing boats, and one sportsman even drove through the lines by car; but they were only a fraction of the numbers expected at the great reception camp prepared at Taranto.

At one British officers’ camp, ironically the nearest to our lines, stay put was interpreted so literally that British officers stood guard over British officers to prevent individual escapes after the Italian guards had deserted. Thus several hundred prisoners waited like lambs until the Germans drove up in lorries to take them to the train for Germany. Many of them subsequently risked broken limbs and spandau bullets jumping from the train before it reached the Brenner Pass. At other camps prisoners marched out a jump ahead of the Germans, in military formations, in bridge fours, or in backgammon units and settled in the mountains, confidently awaiting the arrival of British troops. Many waited three months; most were recaptured.

In September 1943, there were probably 50,000 prisoners at large in Italy. Never was there so strange a tourist season. The Italian uplands teemed with Allied travellers and every mountain had its hermits and its troglodytes.

The men who hid and waited delayed too long. By the time they realized that the Allies were not coming and started south to meet them, the lines had hardened and the first snows of winter had begun to fall. Men died of starvation and exposure in the mountains or lost toes and fingers from frostbite. Some were killed by our own artillery barrages or were blown up by landmines. One prisoner actually met a British patrol and continued with it, only for the whole patrol to be captured, himself with it. Another was discovered in a well-stocked mountain cave by a German squad who had lost their way on a map-reading exercise.

At the end of October the steady trickle through the lines had dwindled to an occasional arrival and the Borah, the sudden, squally North Wind that blows from the mountains, was beginning to make the Adriatic unsafe for small craft. We heard that the resurgent Fascists had recruited armed bands of young thugs to hunt down escaped prisoners. It looked as if the fate of those still in hiding was sealed.

It was then that we had exciting news—five hundred officers and men were hiding in a coastal area. We ran up one night by motor torpedo boat to tell them that the Navy was coming for them. I was part of that Navy.

I was captured by the Germans in a partisan fishing boat off the Dalmatian Island of Lussin on November 13, 1943. As a result of a wound then sustained I was repatriated via Sweden on September 9, 1944.

I am well aware that my own term of captivity was but a dogwatch compared with that of the majority of prisoners of war, but I do not intend to apologize on that account for writing about it.

Lest anyone be misled by the comparative absence of brutality in this record or misinterpret our feelings towards the Germans, I include these notes on the treatment of prisoners of war by the Germans and the Italians, for it has an important bearing on any understanding of the German character.

It may surprise many people, in view of recent revelations of the horrors of Buchenwald, Belsen, and Dachau, that prisoners who experienced captivity under both Germans and Italians were unanimous in their preference for captivity in Germany.

In Germany we, as members of the armed forces, were the prisoners of the equivalent arm of the Wehrmacht: the Gestapo and S.S. were rarely seen at our camps. Between 1940 and the beginning of 1945, British and American prisoners of war, in organized camps, were treated on the whole correctly (though not always humanely) by their captors. For the Germans, when they obey the letter of the law, are sticklers at it; but their treatment of Russians, Poles, Jews, and civilian prisoners left us under no illusions as to their complete unconcern with the spirit of it.

In Italy a prisoner of war was always exposed to the pettiness, meanness, dishonesty, excitability, or self-dramatization of individuals, and in a country where the general standards of hygiene and medical attention is so much below that of other civilized countries, the prisoner, with the best will in the world, gets a raw deal.

True, the German scale of rations was much below that agreed to under the Geneva Convention, but it was enough to support life, and it always arrived, scrupulously measured to the last gram. In Italy rations, at whatever scale, were always uncertain. A prisoner prefers to know where he stands.

The Germans, too, were always at great pains to impress on their service prisoners their honesty in small matters, and it was a common belief in prisoner-of-war camps that cigarette parcels that failed to arrive were more likely lost on our own than on German railways. In Italy pilfering was the rule; in Germany it was the exception.

One small anecdote is sufficient to illustrate this convenient distinction between letter and spirit that is basic in the German character and explains such anomalies in their treatment of prisoners. A British officer worked with German clerks in the mail office of our camp. It was the custom to send tea across to the mail office, in the forenoon and afternoon, a cup for the officer and a cup each for the clerks; occasional douceurs of cigarettes, soap, or chocolate, were found to expedite the routine of sorting and censorship. One morning when the British officer handed round his cigarette case as usual, the German clerks held up their hands self-righteously. Nein, nein! they said. We have received orders from Major Goosefelt. Herr Major has told us we are not in future permitted to receive gifts of cigarettes, chocolate, or soap from British prisoners as British prisoners only give these things in order to receive something in return. A few minutes later the tea arrived. The British officer, took his cup and ordered the others to be taken back to the camp. The German clerks were instantly aggrieved. Our tea? they chorused. But you’ve just said you aren’t allowed to receive anything from prisoners, said the British officer. Ja, ja, was the reply, but Herr Major said only cigarettes, chocolate, and soap. He did not say tea.

As the war drained German manpower our camp guards grew older, shabbier, and more decrepit and their attitude towards us lost all trace of arrogance and verged at times on abject servility.

One was almost tempted to pity these pathetic old posterns, in their threadbare, ill-fitting uniforms, with their pince-nez, their potbellies, and their rheumatism, their over-large steel helmets almost resting on their collarbones, but we remembered what was happening to Russians, Poles, Jews, and civilians.

We in German prison camps in 1944, confronted with the dismal, daily spectacle of our captors foreswearing their Fatherland for a cigarette, never forgot that these were the same men who starved, butchered, and tortured prisoners of other nationalities and, provided they were ordered, saw nothing wrong in doing so.

We hated the Germans in a way we were never able to hate the Italians. You can only despise a man who gives way to purely human failings, but you hate the man who denies the whole principle of decent human behavior.

One of the first things inevitably lost by prisoners of war is an objective viewpoint. A prisoner sees his prison twice only—on entering and on leaving it. While he is in it, the barbed wire, the shabby hutment, the dusty cinderpatch, and the unvarying routine become part of his subjective life and soon—perhaps in one month, perhaps in two, according to temperament—he is no longer conscious of the oddities, the absurdities, and the ironies of his predicament. The slow march of Time and the dead halt of environment dull perception; familiarity induces anaesthesia.

In my own case, conditioned as I was to an objective view by nine years’ peacetime experience as a newspaperman, I found this faculty slipping from me after the sixth week in the same surroundings. But in this respect I was luckier than most, for my ten months as prisoner of war took me to six camps and four hospitals, from Jugoslavia into Northern Italy, to Silesia, the Sudetenland and Hanover in the Reich, and finally to Sweden.

For those who are interested in these matters, the camps were Stalag I 337 (Mantua), Stalag 344 (Lamsdorf), Oflag VIII F (Maerisch-Trubau), and Dulag, Milag, and Marlag Nord (Westertimke, near Bremen).

The fact that my left arm was in plaster of Paris during the whole of this period arbitrarily cut me off from most of the normal pursuits of prisoners—playing games or musical instruments, gardening, acting in shows, cooking, tatting or building model boats—and left me no excuse not to write. This was my escape. For, as Somerset Maugham has said: The writer has one compensation. Whenever he has anything on his mind, whether it be grief at the death of a friend, unrequited love, wounded pride...in short any emotion or any perplexity of thought, he has only to put it down in black and white, using it as theme of a story or the decoration of an essay, to forget all about it. He is the only free man.

So here it is, put down in black and white at the time it was happening. The first part of the book is narrative. I have told the events leading up to my capture subjectively because being captured is a very personal matter and that is the only way it makes sense. The second part of the book consists largely of what I should call documentary short stories illustrating different aspects of prisoner-of-war life; I have told them objectively, because captivity is a very impersonal matter, and that is the only way captivity makes sense. In these stories the incidents recorded, the backgrounds depicted, and the types presented are true, except in so far as I have seen fit to impose the design of a short story upon them.

My aim throughout has been to present an accurate picture of things as they were. My motives were personal—so that I should not bore my wife with endless anecdote, so that I should be forearmed with an adequate answer to the inevitable question, What was it like? I knew that as soon as I returned and groped for the broken ends of the thread of my life, I should forget this strange catalepsis and, in a week or two, should find it difficult to believe these things really happened.

And, if further excuse for writing were needed, it would be that I was fortunate enough to have as friend and companion in most of these experiences Lieutenant John Worsley, R.N.V.R., Official Naval War Artist, who illustrated the book.

PART ONE—FIASCO

November, 1943

"History which never sleeps or dies

And, held one moment, burns the hand..."

AUDEN

Chapter One—CAPTURE AND KAFFEE

THE MOMENT I WAS SHOT I KNEW THAT IT HAD ALL happened before.

I was kneeling in the bottom of the hold of the fishing boat pressing another clip into the magazine of my rifle. John and the three naval commando ratings were standing in the well firing at the two Arado float planes that were attacking us. I saw them duck as another burst hit us.

It felt as if a horse had kicked me on the left forearm. My rifle clattered, and my wrist and hand went numb. I sat down and held my arm up. The hand flopped effeminately. I was very surprised. It didn’t hurt at all.

I’ve been hit, I said.

Marco, a partisan staff officer who was sitting in the hold, leaned forward and pointed to a rip in the shoulder of his greatcoat.

My bullet, he said, grinning. I remember thinking it a poor joke.

I asked someone to do me up and King, one of the ratings, had a field-dressing pad out in no time.

When I peeled back the sleeves of my battle dress and jersey, a dark fountain of blood spurted from a neat blue hole on the inside of my arm just below the elbow. There was another hole on the outside. King clapped the pad on, and while he tied it I made a tourniquet under the armpit with a pencil and a rifle pull-through.

An armor-piercing bullet evidently. The side of the boat through which it had passed could not have flattened it at all. Lucky. I could even move my fingers slightly.

I stopped being surprised. It was the final confirmation of a growing suspicion.

I became indignant. I suddenly thought, hell, I can’t swim now.

For as soon as the seaplanes had appeared out of the early morning haze and it was evident that escape was cut off and that we would be sunk, I had carefully removed my boots, for I am at home in the water and regard it as a friendly element. What chance had a thirty-foot wooden fishing boat with a five-knot engine, a jammed Breda, and four or five