There are many bricks in the veterans memorial plaza where I live in Texas each with a different name and a different story. The brick I want to
talk about looks a bit different than the rest and I hope to explain why, and
why it sits with all the others.
It all started
with a trip to Hawaii to celebrate our 40th anniversary. My wife and
I flew to Honolulu a day early so that we could visit the USS Arizona Memorial
before we headed off on a seven day islands cruise. We got on the coach to
Pearl Harbor early in the morning and were entertained by our driver with
multiple tales of the islands and tourists like ourselves. When he asked for
questions one of our numbers asked him why so many Japanese visited the Arizona
Memorial. I must admit to a moment of apprehension anticipating his answer but
when it came it was quite unlike my unworthy expectations. He asked us all to
think about how our world was changed by the Pearl Harbor attack and how the
world was changed for the Japanese too. As I thought about his question I
thought about my father and his circumstances on December 7th 1941.
In December
1941 my mother and father were not yet engaged, far less married and I was not
yet born. In fact I was not even a twinkle since I was not born until 1949. On Pearl
Harbor day my father was in a German Army POW camp in Torun, Poland (Camp 17 of
Stalag_XX_A as I recall). Absent the attack his prospects of ever returning
home to Scotland alive were vanishingly remote. It goes without saying that
such a failure to return home would have seen my parents unmarried and me
unborn.
The story of
how he finished up as a POW is a tragic one, quite embarrassing to Winston
Churchill’s reputation and greatly forgotten by military historians of WWII
both in the USA and UK. He volunteered for the army in September 1939 the week
that war was declared in the UK. He was inducted into the Seaforth Regiment and
sent to Fort George, near Inverness in Scotland. After only 3 months training
he was issued a Lee Enfield bolt action rifle and 100 rounds of .303 ammunition
and shipped out to France in January 1940 in the 4th Battalion Seaforths, part of the 51st
Highland Division. The division was eventually stationed at the northern end of
the Maginot Line near Metz, quite separate from the rest of the British Army.
Those readers who are military historians will realize that the 51st
HD location was a precarious one, although they didn’t know that at the time
but soon would.
When the
Phony War ended and the real shooting started around May 10th 1940
the main German armored thrust landed north of the 51st HD, went
through Sedan and onward to the English Channel coast near Calais, cutting the
51st off from the rest of the British Army. Elements of the 51st
division did take part in supporting French armor assaults northward into the
flank of the German penetration but without air support and after the German
anti-tank forces worked out how to disable the heavily armored French tanks,
these all failed.
The rest of
the British Army was famously evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk between May
27th and June 4th leaving the 51st HD the only
British division left fighting in France (the 50th division was in
the process of landing at Cherbourg but were soon turned around and sent back
to the UK). The 51st, including my father, fell back along the line
of the river Somme arriving near St Valery sur Somme on the English Channel
coast by May 28th. They were soon engaged by strong mechanized and
infantry forces. The danger of being outflanked by German armor on the right
drove them slowly back toward their bases of supply at Le-Havre and Rouen. When
these bases were cut off they fell back to St Valery-en-Caux on the channel
coast where they attempted to hold a perimeter while awaiting to be rescued by
sea. But rescue became impossible when the beaches came under direct artillery
fire. They might have been saved if earlier action had been taken but Churchill
had delayed efforts to rescue the 51st and to keep them in the fight as a
political bargaining tool with the French to keep them from capitulating; now
it was too late.
On June 12th
1940 the French forces supporting them surrendered and, absent food, fuel,
ammunition and medical supplies, and with no embarkation possible the 51st
was surrendered to the famous German general Erwin Rommel. The 10,000 men of
the division, mostly Scottish, were marched off as POWs to an uncertain future.
At the time of this surrender the 51st Highland Division was
surrounded by the 5th and 7th armored divisions, the 2nd
motorized division, the 11th motorized brigade, the 57th,
31st, 12th, and 32nd infantry divisions of the
German Army. A small force did escape through German lines to Le-Havre and
returned to the UK but my father was not one of the fortunate ones.
He and his
buddies were stripped of all that was valuable the marched eastward toward
Germany. Besides marching they were carried in coal barges, in trucks and
finally by train in cattle cars to Torun, Poland which is near Gdansk, or
Danzig as it was called in those days. Here they entered into the German camp
system, in his case as a private soldier. They were organized by service, rank
and nationality. The British were treated better than most, albeit not all that
well. They were issued rations of 1/5th of a loaf of black bread and
a bowl of soup per day. Why 1/5th of a loaf is a mystery that only
the Germans knew the answer to. At the beginning the bread was okay and the
soup had recognizable vegetables and some protein in it. As time passed the
‘bread’ became sweepings and the soup became warm water.
As a private
soldier my father was obliged to work in either the coal mines or on local
farms. He volunteered to be a farm worker because it allowed him access to
foodstuffs not available in camp that he could trade for. The POWs were
sustained by Red Cross parcels, actually boxes, many supplied from the USA
through Switzerland. They were supposed to receive one parcel per week but got
far fewer, and sometimes none for months. The parcels contained cans of coffee,
cans containing American cigarettes, cans of butter, chocolate, candies and
other highly desirable products that were rarely consumed by the POWs but used
as trade goods to swap for potatoes,
carrots, eggs and other staples from local farmers. It was these staples that
kept them alive through the next five years.
He escaped a
few times; well he walked away from the farm he was working on, but with little
success. When recaptured, prisoners were yelled at, perhaps hit with a rifle
butt a few times, and then they were sentenced to 21 days solitary in the camp
prison, the cooler. His most successful escape attempt reached the docks at
Gdansk where he and his buddy were caught climbing the dockyard fence next to a
Swedish cargo ship. So he was returned to the camp and his 21 day penance
before heading out on the next work party to another farm. To my father it was
all an adventure to escape the monotony of camp life. His family circumstances
before he volunteered was pretty rough so I don’t think POW life was too
unsettling for him, early on at least. He sent a postcard home to his
sweetheart, my mother to be, consisting of a photograph of his hut and its
residents and telling her that he was alive (I still have it). They
corresponded by letter throughout his captivity maintaining their romance from
afar. There is a family story that towards the end of the war, while he was
again in solitary, he was informed by the guards that his older brother was in
camp looking for him. Having been captured in Tobruk in North Africa and having
had many adventures before pitching up in Poland his older brother, my uncle
Jim got back to Scotland the same week as my dad.
In December
1941 my father had been a POW for over a year and a half. Although the Germans
had attacked the Soviet Union in June that year the POWs had little hope of an
end to the war in circumstances that would see them return home victorious.
Then Pearl Harbor happened and when Churchill was informed of the attack wrote
that he “…went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful”. I suspect
that the POWs had a similar reaction when they found out than America had
entered the war on their side.
Towards the
end of 1944 and beginning of 1945 the camps in Poland were emptied and the POWs
were rounded up and driven west to escape the advancing Soviet forces. This
little known episode is called “The March” by those who took part in it. Over a
period of about four months from January to April, they were marched about back
and forth across Poland and Germany for more than 500 miles in some of the most
brutally cold conditions. There was very little food and those who fell out of
line to raid a farmer’s field for some potatoes were often shot. Estimates vary
but between 100,000 to 200,000 allied POWs took part with between 2000 and 3000
that died on the way. One morning in late April or early May 1945 my father
woke in a field near Hamburg. The guards had gone and soon allied forces
arrived – he was free!
My dad
returned home to Scotland and soon persuaded my mother to marry him. They
settled down in central Scotland and raised two boys, my elder brother and me.
Although he worked pretty much every day of his life my father’s health was
affected by his time as a POW. He died young, not quite 55, and a little over a
year after my mom died. She was barely in her 50’s when she died having been
seriously ill since her early 30’s.
So what has
all this to do with a brick in our Veterans Memorial Garden? Well, I was
telling a neighbor this tale a number of years back. He is a Vietnam veteran
who was seriously wounded flying helicopters in the 1st Cavalry. He
was interested in my Dad’s story and my experience on the bus heading to the
Arizona memorial. It was he who suggested the brick. So that is why the brick
is there, not just to memorialize my father but to remind folks of what the
others memorialized there have done to rescue freedom, and to place my dad’s
name in a country he loved and among those who saved his life and who gave me
mine. But for America and Americans, my dad would not have survived and I would
not have been born and would never have emigrated to the United States of America
and become one of its citizens – and I would never then have placed the brick.
Further reading for the military history buff:
1.
Churchill’s Sacrifice of the Highland
Division, by Saul David
2.
The St. Valery Story, by Ernest Reoch
3.
The Highland Division, by Eric Linklater
4.
St Valery, the impossible odds, edited
by Bill Innes
5.
Return to St Valery, by Derek Lang
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