In the camp I was a guard, I’d stand by the door to see if anyone was coming – to see if it was safe to put the news on. We’d make sure the guards weren’t going to come in and catch us with all the wires and the radio. The engineers from the bombers were pretty good; they’d make little radios out of tine cans and wires. They played a great part in the camp so we could get the BBC news. Just a few months before the war was actually over we heard the news that the Third Army was moving fast; that it wouldn’t be long before the camp was overrun by the allies. It was critical to the Germans that we be moved out quickly.
About 150 miles away from the camp there was fighting going on. The allies were heading towards our camp. When they started getting close, maybe 25 or 30 miles away, they got us all together one night and put us all on the road. They opened the gates and the guards formed all around us in a huge line-up. I don’t know how many POW’s there were, but it must’ve been in the thousands, I think! They accumulated everybody from all the camp sectors. They had enough guards, a lot of older men. I guess they were pretty desperate, they lost so many men. All the best of the German fighting troops were at the front trying to slow down the enemy or maybe at another battlefront where the Russians were moving fast. They (the Allies) were all converging; they were all heading for Berlin, that’s where Hitler was based, the main city. We hit the road and moved further into the interior. We moved down towards Moosberg – that’s where we ended up was Moosberg. Now how long we were on the road I don’t know, but we slept here and there, in barns sometimes.
The Germans knew what was happening, but they still had their guns on us, we were still prisoners; they were marching with us. They’d come in the morning if we were on the ground and they’d say, rouse, rouse! We’d have to get up and start marching.
When we evacuated the camp, my friend George got into some trouble. He wasn’t in the same hut as I was. He and another chap went under the flooring of their hut. There’s space down there of probably two or three feet. They got under and stayed there. The Germans didn’t check it out, so when everybody evacuated, they were still under the floor. We were all gone, thousands of people. I don’t know if anybody in any other camp, in a hut or in the area stayed under, but George thinks they were all alone. They went out walking, but there’s nowhere to go really. We were about a couple of hundred miles inside the lines, but in the end, the allies were probably only a few miles away. What happened was they were backing up from the front lines and they caught these guys (George and friend). They had no place to hide! So the soldiers got them back with our group. We were marching down the road and along comes George in a truck! So I said, jump in with us, they’ll never know. So he jumped off the truck and into our group and that was it, he was back in business with us.
We weren’t supposed to do anything foolish, we weren’t helping anybody, and we weren’t armed. George and his friend were lucky they weren’t shot in the back! An army backing up doesn’t waste too much time.
The Germans might have been nervous about reprisals though because they were going to be overrun.
We weren’t always close to villages, but in one village I remember staying in a kind of courtyard. I was with a fellow, a Major Clete Glesener, we chummed up together. We had a big branch of a tree, a big limb between our shoulders to carry our kit bags. Anyway, in the courtyard area, he got upset, his stomach was hurting. I remember I went out and knocked on doors within the courtyard. A little nun answered the door in one place and I said, avanzi brot? I only knew a couple of words in German. I was trying to ask for bread. She didn’t have bread but she gave me an egg and I gave her a bar of soap that came with the Red Cross parcel. She didn’t say much. I brought back the egg to give to Clete. I didn’t fry it; I probably boiled it in a bit of water. He felt better after that.
It’s the little things, but you can get accustomed to the dirt and stuff, we lived in mud and crap. We were dirty. I had the same underwear on for about four months. We got to the Danube River, I remember I turned my underwear inside out and went bathing in the water. Not many people can say they bathed in the Danube! The river looked kind of muddy when we got out, it wasn’t the nice blue Danube they have in the song. There were so many of us that were dirty. As we were moving further away from the Danube River, I heard a big explosion! They blew up the bridge over the river to slow down the American army. It was General Patton and his army; there wasn’t much that would slow him down.
We crossed a farm one time; it was a field of sugar beets. So we went wild. I took a couple of bites of raw sugar beet, but I wasn’t that fussy about it; even when I was so hungry. It didn’t bother me but a little while later thousands of fellows were squatting in the field. Some wanted to die, they were already hungry. What they took from the sugar beets – it turned their stomachs. It was all diarrhea, it was unbelievable! What a sight to see, thousands of guys like that, sick! That was a strange thing! On the forced march, the Germans put the injured on an unmarked freight train; no Red Cross symbol on top. They used the Red Cross marked vehicles for their own troops, which was kind of dirty because our bombers wouldn’t touch a Red Cross vehicle.
Do you remember the injured man that I mentioned earlier, the man from Montreal West? He was on the train. He asked me to go with them because they needed one volunteer to help the injured. I don’t like the sight of blood actually, but I went on the train. They were bringing them for a short run for five or ten miles in this freight car and dropping them off again. So there I was – I had no serious physical problems but I was with all these fellows who had lost legs, burnt faces, all maimed in some respect. About thirty or forty were packed in – there was hardly room to move. I was alone with all this group and my job was to carry them when they had to go to the washroom. There was no washroom because it was a freight train, so I had to slide the doors open. I’d carry them, you know, some were big men, thank goodness I was used to lifting heavy weights. I’m not used to being with a lot of invalids; it’s different for the corps that specialized in it. That was I think the worst experience I had. Overnight, you’d hear the moaning – they wanted to die, you know? It was so sad it really shook me.
I don’t know how long the forced march took or how many miles we travelled but we ended up at a camp in Moosburg.
To see photos of the Moosburg camp ruins, courtesy of “Stan Instone, Sergeant Flight Engineer with 419 Squadron RCAF shot down on 20th February 1945 over Dortmund” http://www.moosburg.org/info/stalag/instoneeng.html
Then one night all was quiet. The guards had all disappeared when we got up in the morning. The Third Army came through and bang! knocked down all the fences with their tanks. We were told by our Major, the superior officer, it’s over for us now. We were to keep calm, don’t get mixed up with the civilians down in the town, don’t disturb them. We were told we could roam around as long as we came back to camp. We walked around, that’s probably when I picked up some items I have.
The Russians went down there, they raped, they stole, they beat up people, they did everything! They were a pretty wild group from the camp. They’d been treated badly; really badly by the Germans, but they retaliated badly! We stayed clear of that! I don’t remember anyone, Canadian or American beating up on anybody. We didn’t invade houses, which we could’ve. We just walked around – if a place was empty we may have walked in and just looked out of curiosity but that was it.
Then the Red Cross arrived. All those people to help us get back into shape! They fed us; they gave me a box of cereal of some kind and some milk. I remember I poured the milk into a big can and I ate the whole damn box of cereal. I got sick to my stomach for a few days.
The Dieppe prisoners, those fellows who had been in prison for four or five years, the Red Cross gave them little stoves that you turned with a crank to heat up your tea or coffee, or water. They were the first to be flown out. They flew them to Reims, France. Then they got down to the recent prisoners, you know, and the Red Cross checked us out and fed us. We got an aircraft from there and they ferried us to Reims as well. In Reims, there were German soldiers who were shining the shoes of the ex-prisoners. It was kind of embarrassing, the soldiers were muddied, and they put their boots out and got them shined by any Germans that were there. It was a strange sight!
From Reims, they moved us to Bournemouth, England. It’s a beautiful seaside town – that’s where we started off when we got overseas. later on from Bournemouth, we were sent back to Canada. While we were waiting for transport the officers got an invitation to Buckingham Palace for tea. I had a friend that wanted to go to London, I had some friends there. I wanted to have a bit of a party so I passed on the invitation to tea; I had already met the King and Princess Elizabeth while I was in the Lion Squadron.
I wanted to go to London because I had a girlfriend there. After I turned down the invite to tea, I phoned her to confirm a date. It turned out that it was over. I didn’t know that she was married; she thought her husband was dead. He was an army man. She told me her husband had been found alive. He was an officer and had been in India or someplace. She was very young and had married young. I was glad for her. It had never got to the point where I met her family. All that I knew was that her father owned some pubs. She was a lovely girl, I really liked her. In Bournemouth, we were entitled to special rations, like eggs and milk. If we went to a London restaurant we were allowed to say we were a POW, so we could get a steak. I never bothered, I never asked for anything special. I usually had fish and chips – I wanted chocolate bars but nobody had that.
In Bournemouth, we were given free rail passes and I had fourteen days’ leave. So I went to Darlington to visit my friends, the Mackenzies. They were a host family that I had met earlier in my time in Britain, we could go and eat there. There was a ground crewman and my cousin Jack who used to go visit them too. They were like a family away from home for us. One of the Mackenzie girls was a few years older than me, she had a baby girl. Her younger sister fell for my cousin Jack. I always thought of the older girl like a big sister. She came with me to a dance at the squadron, after the war, since I didn’t have a girlfriend.
The dance at the squadron was a closing party; the bomber squadron was going home. At the party, one of the Australians on the squadron looked at me and yelled, “you’re a ghost!” I guess he was in another bomber from our group. He apparently saw our plane blow up. He didn’t tell me what hit it, but he was flying in the dark. He must’ve reported it back, but he swore that nobody could’ve come out of that alive. I guess he saw the big flash, it’s just a burst of gas and oil and bombs on board, everything blew! I can understand what he was talking about because I used to take note of the bombers and all I saw most of the time, was boom! A big burst in the sky and everything disintegrated.
Since we had free rail travel, I had wanted to go to Belfast, Ireland for Michael Harris, he was our engineer on that last flight. Mike had just written to his girlfriend that he had this one last trip to finish, but of course, he was killed. It was very sad. I never made the trip, but I can’t remember why not.
After I got home, I got all my information from Ottawa; in regard to my whole life in the Air Force. I wanted to know what they did about the last flight. Apparently they found pieces on the ground of two or three of the crew, not enough to bury them. They were able to identify the aircraft.