Armageddon - Max Hastings [284]
Self-respect was deeply corroded by confinement, and that of some prisoners collapsed altogether. “I have seen men degrade themselves to beg for an inch or so of a cigarette being smoked by a guard,” wrote Sergeant Robert Harding. “I have seen men sell the very clothes from their backs for a single fag.” Corporal Denis Thomas observed: “People say: ‘Oh, you were only inside for six months.’ But they were the worst six months of my life.” Many men felt outcasts, cut off from their own kind, their lives deprived of purpose and dignity. Grievances and frustrations became obsessional. Denied privacy, they took refuge in hiding small items, especially food. “Even reasonable men would waste hours in childish kicking against the pricks,” wrote Squadron-Leader Peter Campbell, an RAF officer in Sagan. Tiny events assumed extravagant proportions. One day in the autumn of 1944, some prisoners were allowed out of the perimeter under escort, for a walk. Campbell found this “an overpowering sensation.” New arrivals were intently questioned about the outside world: “How’re we doing? Is London still standing?” In some camps, the dissemination of news received by secret radios was highly organized. New Zealand doctor Richard Feltham was amazed on his first morning in Stalag XXA to receive a smart salute from a Guards sergeant-major who handed him two duplicated sheets, saying: “The Times, sir!”
Morale improved in 1944. When news of D-Day reached Tom Barker’s camp, a big Londoner named Bob, who had been attempting with indifferent success to grow tomatoes, dashed to his vegetable plot and joyfully tore up every plant: “I shan’t need the bloody things!” Bob was premature, but at nights thereafter prisoners could see the glow of war on the eastern horizon and hear the rumble of explosions. “We were never satisfied unless we heard the Allies were advancing very rapidly,” wrote Peter Campbell, “and we had no patience when they were stopped for any period.”
Some men became involved in escape plans not because they possessed a serious hope of gaining freedom, but because fantasies of escape provided a focus for lives that were otherwise purposeless. Only a tiny number of Allied prisoners made successful “home runs,” or indeed tried to do so. The difficulties were enormous, even if one spoke good German and was granted extraordinary luck. Peter Campbell felt grateful that a leg injury sustained when he parachuted into the Channel from his Spitfire in April 1942 disqualified him from taking part in Sagan’s 1943 “Great Escape,” which provoked the Nazis to shoot fifty of the officers recaptured. A giant sign was thereafter displayed in the camp by the Germans: “ESCAPE IS NO LONGER A SPORT.” Campbell wrote: “Escape starts as a madness, then the PoW adjusts and becomes institutionalised.” He himself worked in the props department of the camp theatre, and attended Spanish classes. Every man was hungry, and matters worsened dramatically in the last months of the war. Campbell lost over forty pounds. Private Jerome Alexis of the U.S. 110th Infantry, who had been captured in the Hürtgen Forest in November 1944, was among a group of enlisted men working in the officer camp Oflag LXIV at Altburgund. There were educational classes of all kinds. Alexis studied French and German, but still found the boredom crippling.
John Killick suffered a special difficulty, that his marriage was unhappy. He had to think through his personal problems under exceptionally unpromising circumstances. “But I discovered inner resources. I read a lot of Dickens, wrote up my Arnhem diary.” It is dismaying to notice the number of women who felt no scruple about informing husbands behind the wire in Germany of their defection, or even of pregnancy by another man. This added emotional anguish to conditions that were already