My dad was one of eight brothers. The oldest of these, born in 1915, was called David. I can remember him from the 1950s but he was always a bit distant, a bit odd in an inoffensive way. He never married and worked as a barman all his life, there were a couple of places he always worked in summer and winter. He sometimes used to rock up at our house for a week or two either as a holiday or maybe he was resting as the thespians call it.
I remember him always having a capstan full strength in the corner of his mouth. He never seemed to remove it but left it there until there was the smallest stub left. As a consequence he blinked a lot as the smoke drifted past his eyes. I am not sure when he stopped smoking but he lived until he was 85. He had a nicotine stain on his lip from this perpetual cigarette hanging from his mouth.
I knew he had been a prisoner of the Italians but very little else. I heard the wops did not treat him too well but was never enlightened further.
Ancestry had a free military weekend a few weeks ago and I found details of his captivity. It looks like a handwritten statement givien to MI9 and containing the barest details of what happened.
David joined the Queens Royal Regiment in April 1940 when he was 24 years old. His Battalion was in Operation Braganza which took place shortly before the 2nd Battle of El Alamein. He was captured on the 1st October 1942 when his company attacked the Italians at Deir El Munassib. Unfortunately the ridge they attacked was occupied by paratroopers of the Folgore Division who were every bit as capable as their Geman counterparts. The end result was that he was taken prisoner while many others were killed.
He was suffering from dysentery and spent 3 months in hospital in Rome. He was then moved to Camp Number 54 at Passo Corese, 22 miles from Rome at the start of 1943 to September 8th 1943. It was at this time that Mussolini was removed and Italy switched sides. He was moved to Austria and housed at Stalag XVIIIA at Wolfsberg and remained there from November 1943 to April 1945 when he was liberated.
Having looked up Camp 54 in Wikipedia it seems the prisoners were in tents with very poor conditions and food shortages. When the Germans took over the remaining 1,100 prisoners, the Italians were not so conscientious guards towards the end, were put on a train to be moved north. When the train was crossing the Orvieto bridge the Americans arrived to bomb the bridge while the train was on it. The Germans left the boxcars locked and fled. Approximately half the men were killed by the bombs or when the cars tumbled into the river below. Those who survived had jumped into the river below.
Many of the prisoners at the camp in Austria were farmed out to local factories and farms where they had to work 10 and a half hours a day plus marching there and back. David was only a private and what we usually see in the movies is camps for officers where conditions were much better than those experienced by the other ranks. The only thing I heard from another of his brothers is that the Italians were not kind to their guests and it was much better in Austria.
The location Marine mentioned on the document was probably St Marein in Wolfsberg.
More insult came in December 1944 when the camp was bombed by the Americans, fog of war and all that shall we say.
He was captured in a real fire fight as they call it these days, suffered from dysentery, was put in a really bad camp in Italy, his train was bombed on its way to Austria, he had to work for a year and a half in a factory for hours on end and the camp he was in was also bombed by the Americans. No wonder he was not quite the same when he arrived back home.
It looks like marching to work, maybe every day, and working 10.5 hours on a no doubt very boring job was better than being in a tent with bad conditions and not enough grub. You can imagine the howls from the left if we treated our invaders like that.
I was hoping to find such details of another brother’s time as a PoW. He was taken prisoner at Arnhem by the SS who were none too friendly. This brother was as strong as an ox but gentle with it, he developed a lifelong aversion to the hun during his captivity. The story of the poor devils who were victims of Operation Market Garden was that at the end of the war these lads were hopping mad at Monty whom they blamed for the fiasco. Monty by this time was the great hero and not a word was to be heard against him so the surviving paratroopers were not demobbed but sent to Palestine. As serving members they were not able to utter any criticism of anyone.
© well_chuffed 2024
