Personal Experiences of a POW

My Grandfather Joseph White was a POW for most of WWII. He died in January of 1988 aged 68 years. These are some of his recollections as told to my mother.

He enlisted as a Private in the 1st Leicestershire Regiment (The Tigers) before the outbreak of war and became a bren-gunner. He was sent to France in 1940 and landed in Brittany. He was 19 years old.

He was captured outside of Dunkirk after his regiment was ordered to defend and then blow up the bridges in the surrounding area. This effectively cut them off from the town and the beaches, he said they just sat down in the roads and waited for the Germans to take them.

He said he heard the immortal phrase "For you boys the war is over" spoken by Americans of German descent who were fighting for the Nazis and were used as interpreters. He always said "they were swine" very power-crazed and anti-british.

He was moved to a concentration camp in Aachen where the prisoners spent several weeks. He said he saw terrible things and would never be drawn on the subject. Once, when pressed however, he admitted to seeing babies being used for bayonet practice and dogs that had been trained to rape women.

He and thousands of others were then sent on the long march to Eastern Europe. You marched or you were shot. When they marched through towns or villages, the local women and children lined the streets and spat at them. At one point, they crossed the Rhine and the Nazi soldiers began trying to collect their tin helmets for the German war effort, my grandfather and hundreds of others under threat of death threw them into the river.

Occasionally they were loaded into cattle trucks and transported by rail. The weather was so cold that the men on the edge froze to the wagon sides. One night he slept in a ditch with two others, he was in the middle. They saved his life as when he awoke the next morning they had frozen to death on either side of him. Many prisoners were shot as they became too weak to walk.

He spent the remainder of WWII in Eastern Europe working in quarries hauling sleds and logging in the mountains. He was badly injured when a sled toppled over onto him and a Polish doctor set his leg with only rough alcohol for anaesthetic. He and many of the other prisoners tried to find ways to sabotage the mechanical equipment they were working with-often making more work for themselves. They pushed wagons into the quarry and once someone put a spanner or something into the funnel of an engine. It took 9 months for the new part to come but in those 9 months they did the work of the engine. The Polish people often risked their lives by giving them imformation about the war and by smuggling food into the camp.

He was in a camp in what used to be East Germany when he was liberated. The camp had a compound for the captured Russian soldiers next to theirs. The British were malnourished-the Russians were dying from starvation and typhus.They didn't get Red Cross parcel and were treated very badly. The British camp got a consignment of parcels and decided to share them with the Russians and on a bitterly cold November night they thanked them with the only thing they had-their voices. A choir of emaciated scarecrows singing their folksongs was something my grandfather never forgot.

When the Americans rolled in with their tanks they bulldozed the fences and ignored all the 'Achtung Typhus' signs. My grandfathers last memory of the camp is of hundreds of infectious Russians scattering into the German countryside to an uncertain freedom.

He gradually made his way back to the British lines and was in the stadium at Nuremberg when the eagle fell.

He flew home to England in a Lancaster bomber which on paper should have been a VIP trip as he got to sit in the co-pilot's seat but unfortunately he was terrified and was ill all the way back!

His weight on repatriation was 7 stones, and he and the other prisoners were given extra chocolate coupons to build them up. He found it difficult to eat after years of bad, little or no food. They started training for the Japanese invasion. He said he whitewashed a lot of stones. No counselling of any note was given to them and the only thing they were told was it was highly unlikely that he could father a child for at least 2 years-hence the 1946 baby boom of which my mother is a part!

He said he never heard the German soldiers called 'goons' or other such names and they certainly weren't figures of fun, they were terrifyingly zealous and they believed totally in what they were doing, the Nazi ideals and their imagined superiority. Many years after the war, my grandparents and mother were travelling through Italy by coach and reached the German border. My grandfather was asleep when a German customs officer got onto the bus shouting in German. My mother said the look of horror in my grandfather's eyes as he awoke and until he realised where he was was terrible.

My memories of my grandfather are of him being a kind, gentle and funny man who I still miss very much. I was only 17 when he died and I am sad he missed so many important things in my life; my graduation, my wedding and the birth of my daughter-a better great-grandfather there wouldn't have been. I have no doubt that the years he spent in the POW camps and the things he saw whilst he was there contributed to his early death however, I feel privilaged to have known him for the time I did.

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