Arnhem and prison camp

REMINISCENCE OF WW2 BY PTE. JOHN BATTLEY, 16TH PARACHUTE FIELD AMBULANCE, RAMC 1ST AIRBORNE DIVISION

At the end of the campaign in North Africa, when I was with the 12th Field Ambulance, our Division (4th) was used to make up the numbers of other units for the campaigns in Sicily and Italy. This brought about a lowering of morale and in order too something definite, my friend and I volunteered for parachute training. We were sent back to England, my friend took advantage of embarkation leave to marry his fiancée, I was best man, and Honor, who later became my wife, was bridesmaid, and so we met. My friend I were posted to the 16th Parachute Field Ambulance, and eventually, on the 17th September 1944 flew off to Arnhem from an airfield in Lincolnshire.

We flew in Dakotas, C47s, which had a static line — a steel cable - running the length of the aircraft, and to which we hooked up our parachutes. Normally we waited until we were about ten minutes from our dropping zone before hooking up, because once hooked up your movements were very restricted. On this occasion we thought there might be German fighter opposition over the North Sea, and so we hooked up soon after crossing the coast. I had a new parachute that had never been used, and the snap-hook would not go over the static line. The flight engineer appeared with a large file and began sawing away at the hook, and it took him twenty-five minutes to make it open far enough to snap over the line; if we had waited until we were ten minutes away from Arnhem I would not have jumped. When we did jump, the slipstream caught my right shoulder and spun me round to that the lift-webs were twisted right down to my helmet, and the canopy very restricted. I had a kitbag of medical equipment strapped to my leg, which I let down on a line to give me some freedom to get rid of the twists, but his simply created a counter-twist down below, and I landed in this awkward position. Fortunately it was a warm sunny day, with plenty of up draught, and the landing was no heavier than usual. The first thing I saw was someone running towards me — not a German soldier, but a Dutch woman after the valuable prize of my parachute as a source of dress material. In he Hartenstein Museum, where all kinds of memorabilia of operation Market Garden as on show, there is a rather fetching wedding dress of parachute silk and it would be nice to think it was from my parachute. I hope the couple were very happy. After that more serious things began to happen. I was later taken prisoner, along with many others.

Let us move to 1945, to the end of the war. I was with a working party of about a hundred men, on the German railways, based in a little town named Jesse, in south eastern Germany. I’ll pick up the story when our six guards were sent as reinforcements to the Russian front, which by now was getting very near. I felt sorry for them; you didn’t get to guard prisoners in the German army unless you were unfit for anything else. The Feldwebel (sergeant) in charge of us was 58 years old and had a stomach ulcer; another was a lad of 19 who had been wounded six times and walked with a permanent limp — he looked rather like Pte Pike of Dad’s Army. I wonder if any of them survived. Their place was taken by members of the Volkssturm, the German equivalent of our Home Guard, elderly men in brown uniforms and shining jack-boots. Next day word came that the Russians had taken Annaburg, about six miles down the road from us, so the Volkssturm held a hasty council of war, gave us their rifles, went home and burnt their uniforms — a very prudent move, I thought.

We stayed in our billet, on the top floor of an old furniture warehouse which commanded a view of the surrounding streets, and in the late afternoon someone looked out of the window and saw a Russian despatch-rider directing Russian vehicles at the nearby crossroads. We all ran over to look, then came rushing down the stairs and into the open, cheering wildly. The Russian despatch-rider, no doubt unused to such an enthusiastic welcome in Germany, lost his nerve and fired a burst on his tommy-gun in our direction. No-one was hit, and the only casualty was one of our number who was coming up the stairs with a can of hot water as we came rushing down, and had it spilt all over him. But this was liberation! We tore down the barbed wire and went out into the street, and the first thing we saw was German people looting the food shops. It slowly dawned on us that unless we joined in and got our share we were soon going to be even more hungry than we had been. There were chaps hacking away at great sides of beef or staggering off with large crates of eggs — it was really quite ridiculous. It seems that we cornered the town’s supply of sugar, and when a few days later a committee was formed and proper rationing re-introduced, they regretted that they had no sugar to give us. We didn’t tell them we had the lot. Rations were a little better than they had been after that, but in other ways the German population suffered badly at the hands of the Russians. Looting was systematic: two Russian soldiers to each street, and they would take any small items- jewellery, watches etc, drink any schnapps in the house, then as the mood took them, or depending on how drunk they were, the might do further damage. The women in the town suffered very badly.

So far as the Russian’s relations with us were concerned it soon became clear that they were not going to do anything for us, but were just as likely to rob us of anything of value we still had as the German SS troops who captured us had been. They did not know who we were, so we manufactured a sort of union jack out of odd pieces of material, but they had no idea what that was either, but still asked “Franzos?...Polski?’ when they ran into us. So some of us decided to try and get back to the western allies on our own, and about a dozen of us began trekking westwards. At this time Germany was in a state of total chaos: German armies were collapsing, German soldiers were shedding their uniforms and trying to find their way back to their homes, German civilians were fleeing westwards before the Russian advance, there were people out of concentration camps, convicts out of prisons, all trying to get somewhere. The wildest rumours were circulating, one very persistent one being that the Americans had declared was on the Russians — a piece of wishful thinking on the part of the German population, who were terrified of the Russians, and not without reason.

We reached the river El be and could get no further westwards. The bridges were all destroyed, and the Russians would not let us use their ferries. What were we to do? We looked around and found an abandoned farm, with a white flag at the entrance. The stock were all there, cattle, sheep, pigs and hens — neighbouring farmers had kept an eye on things. So we took it over. One of our number was a red-haired Canadian farmhand who saw to the milking and another was a Scottish gamekeeper who did any slaughtering we needed. We proceeded to live like lords — we had a young pig one day, a lamb on another, and eggs and milk in abundance. The only thing lacking was bread. No doubt German farmers’ wives all baked their own bread, but none of us had that skill. However, we found an enormous stone jar, about three feet high, full of lard, and we made pancakes. I became adept at tossing them, a skill I retain to this day. Of course, the sudden transition from meagre prisoners’ rations to such a rich diet caused continuous indigestion, but we had been hungry for a long time and were not going to stop eating.

This could not last. One morning a Russian officer arrived with an interpreter — A Russian woman who had been sent back by the Germans for farm work — and put a proposition to us. ‘You want to get across the river and back to your own people. Well, we’re going to build a bridge. Now, wouldn’t it be nice if you came along and gave us a little help?’ These weren’t his actual words, of course, and he left a man with a tommy-gun to emphasise his general point. So there we were, shanghaied by the Russians — prisoners once more. The bridge was a very crude affair, and we never finished it, though that day they kept us working until it was too dark to see what you were doing. Then they herded us into a barn and gave us rather a good stew — the Russians always lived off the land, and slaughtering another German cow will have been routine. We went to sleep, and when we woke up in the morning someone who miraculously still had a watch told is it was nine o’clock. This seemed very uncharacteristic of the Russians to let us have such lie-in, so we looked outside and could see no Russians anywhere. We learnt later that they had been sent to deal with some final German resistance in the Dresden area.

As soon as they had gone, the local population got out all manner of small boats and began ferrying people across the river. We crossed too, and being still in Russian-held territory walked many a further mile before coming to another river, the Mulde, where there was a broken bridge across which one could scramble, and an American sentry on the other side. Now we had with us a Spaniard who had come out of a concentration camp, d had joined us on the road that day — cheerful, perky little chap who shared everything he had with us. When we reached the broken-down bridge we learned that the Americans were only allowing American, British and French ex-prisoners of war into their sector, so we told the sentry that our friend was a Frenchman — an American wouldn’t know the difference, would he? I last saw our friend walking jauntily down the road, all the way to Spain. I rather worried about him, because his having been in a German concentration camp meant that he was an ani-Nazi, and Franco and his fascist government were in power in Spain. I hope he was able to slip in quietly and live out his life in peace.

The Americans gathered us into a collecting camp, from where, a few days later we were taken, very early in the morning, to a large airfield near Magdeburg, where we saw literally thousands of ex-prisoners waiting to be flown home. Some of hem had home-made bivouac tents, so had been there for some time. Seeing this we felt sure it would be days before our turn came. But — and only the Americans could have done this — at about eight o’clock aircraft, Dakotas, began landing, filling up and taking off, landing, filling up and taking off in a continuous stream, one after another, and by eleven o’clock we were away. Apparently this American air force functioned only on the continent, because we were not flown direct to England, but dropped off at Brussels overnight. Here we were given the equivalent of £5 to spend and let loose on the town. We soon found that though this seemed to us a great deal of money - £5 was a good weekly wage before the war — it would buy very little. Everything you could think of was available, at a high price. I thought it amazing that in a country that had been invaded, oppressed and starved, everything was available, while in a victorious country like England, hardly anything was available — and even that was rationed.

At any rate the RAF flew us back to England next day, and I remember the white cliffs as we crossed the coast. We landed somewhere in Sussex and were taken to a camp where we underwent various necessary processes before being sent on leave. I was able to telephone my parents in London — I didn’t know whether they had stayed there during the flying-bomb campaign — but they were there, and my father sent a telegram to Honor who was teaching in Liverpool. Then I was home! One of the days I have described must have been VE-day, but I have no idea which.

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