Armageddon - Max Hastings [287]
Bill Bampton, a private of the East Surreys captured in 1940, started marching with his column from Stalag XXB near Danzig on 24 January. They had some discussion about hiding in the woods to await the Russians, “but I preferred to stay with the crowd, a decision I later regretted.” There were 500 of them, British and French, with intense animosity between the nationalities. The Polish civilians among whom their course first lay were kind, but the cold was deadly: “With our sled, I could not help thinking of Scott’s expedition to the Pole.” They slept mostly in farm buildings.
A crisis came when it was found that some men had pilfered tinned meat from the column’s stocks. The commandant paraded all 500 men, and announced that unless the culprits confessed there would be no further issues of Red Cross parcels. There was a long silence. Then some prisoners urged the guilty to own up: “Be British! Show you’ve got British guts!” A few reluctantly stepped forward, some of whom denounced their fellow culprits. The mood of desperation intensified every day. Bampton was shocked to find his comrades stealing bread from each other’s packs: “A shameful happening . . . I couldn’t help noting another lesson in human nature. The British people are pleasant in pleasant circumstances, but otherwise . . .” He wrote in his diary: “I hate the way our boys behave, rushing and pushing and completely forgetting that they are British soldiers.” He was disgusted by the spectacle of men fighting for possession of Red Cross parcels: “a shocking affair! Talk about wild animals.”
Dr. Helmut Hugel, a German petroleum engineer and enthusiastic Nazi, was walking down a road behind the front when he overtook a column of American prisoners being hastily herded beyond reach of liberation. He was horrified to hear a guard shout: “Anyone who cannot go on will be shot!” Hugel wrote in his diary: “We thought this an empty threat, but soon we saw in the road ditch some prisoners who had indeed been killed. What sort of propaganda could the Americans make out of this, if they find them?”
In the last week of January, the inmates of Oflag LXIV began their own march westward, away from the distant sound of Soviet artillery fire. The prisoners were led by Colonel Paul Goode, a regimental commander captured in Normandy, who had run his camp with iron discipline. Goode was accompanied by his runner, Private Jerome Alexis. On their first day, the Americans covered twelve miles. The elderly guards were in such poor shape that the prisoners sometimes carried their rifles. They soon found themselves suffering dysentery from the local water. One morning, almost all the Germans disappeared. The German commandant, Colonel Schneider, formally surrendered himself to Colonel Goode, who sent a patrol in search of the Russians. Before this could return, however, some of the guards reappeared, accompanied by a detachment of Latvian SS. Colonel Schneider was reinstated. The prisoners’ march continued. They moved westward, pitifully slowly among the mob of refugees. Alexis thought, however, that the American PoWs were treated better than those in British columns they met, among whom guards were using rifle butts ruthlessly. When some Russian prisoners attempted to beg cigarettes from the GIs, they were shot.
Four straggling British prisoners joined the Americans. One of them was a Scot who played the bagpipes. Colonel Goode appointed the soldier and his music to lead their column. To the prisoners’ delight, a shipment of Red Cross parcels appeared. They crossed the Oder among the refugees on a ferry near Swinemünde on 28 February, and were then taken by train—how extraordinary that the Germans could still find rolling stock for such a purpose, at such a time—to Oflag XIIIB at Hammelburg. Thirteen hundred of them had set out from Poland. Just 400 prisoners arrived at Hammelburg. Most of the rest survived, but languished as stragglers up and down Germany.