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Final Section 3

After reaching Nuremberg [Saturday, March 25th] all but two of us set out to march the ten miles to the prison camp. The other fellow was hurt pretty badly when he bailed out. While in a waiting room waiting for a truck to take us out to the camp I struck up a conversation with a Luftwaffe pilot who had been badly burned when shot down by an American.
Finally the truck came and we went to the camp..

Chapter 6 Life in the POW camp at Nuremberg.

[ALF]
. Shortly after entering the compound, to my joy, I found that Chock, Lefty, Ted and Bob were already there, and before long, I was enjoying the very welcome food from Red Cross parcels which had been sent to the camp.
Life in Stalag 13D was quite routine, and most of the time was spent baiting the goons in all sorts of ways, one of which particularly amused me, in that, during morning and evening roll calls, the goons could never arrive at the same numbers, because after counting the first few ranks of three, the first ranks would double back behind the remaining ranks to be counted again. After three or four weeks in Stalag 13D, it became obvious that before long we would either be liberated or moved,
because the sounds of war could be heard getting closer. One morning, all inmates were lined up and told to collect our belongings, because we were on the move. Our belongings consisted of so little that they did not take much assembling!.

[TED/T]
Eventually we got to Nuremberg Prisoner of War camp, and we were standing around outside for a bit and then went into a hut and each one was given a cursory interrogation and some information took down and then we were taken into one of the compounds and that’s where several people immediately got hold of us to give us the update on where the front line was. We hadn’t crossed the Rhine at that stage which they were a little bit disappointed. There were so many people in the prisoner of war camp that we were housed in a big marquee erected within a spare space.
I walked into this big marquee to be greeted by two people “Ted, where the bleedin’ hell have you been?”, there were chaps I ‘d trained with and there were so many people there that what they did, they’d managed to get an issue of Red Cross parcels but it wasn’t enough to split up or really dish up so we had our own kitchen and kitchen staff would use these to produce one meal a day and I remember one day , I don’t know where it came from, perhaps it was something the Germans did supply and it was green pea soup and to every pea there was a bug like a bed bug floating around in this soup, a lot of people wouldn’t touch it but I was that hungry I would eat mine and somebody else’s. It was pretty well organised this and I think probably saved a lot of discontent and even squabbling maybe when it comes to food although it wasn’t sufficient at least you got something each day. We just amused ourselves, mainly with talking and then we heard that we were going to be on the road so we started to get ourselves organised as it was cold still at that time of the year. Alf and I , we decided to sew two blankets together, which we had a blanket each and make a big sleeping bag, we thought we’d probably be warmer that way, we tried it out in the camp, I looked at him next morning, he looked at me and I said “well that’s not going to work, is it” so we unstitched it all and then there was an American Armoured column going mad again, they’d slipped on ahead so rapidly, made such a rapid advance and they’d stopped and there was a big pig farm where they’d stopped and they decided to have a big feast overnight but in the meantime the Germans had re-grouped and they captured the lot of them and put them in our compound and they virtually took over the place. They took over I think because their senior officer was senior to our senior officer and we’d been saving up, I say we, but we hadn’t been there long, but the RAF people in the compound had got things organised cause they knew this was coming up so any chocolate and that in the Red Cross parcels that wasn’t needed was saved for this march , well we didn’t get much out of that because the Americans seemed to take charge of the lot anyway eventually we got marshalled up and got on the road march.
[
LEFTY]
After being searched I went into the camp hospital which was run by British and American doctors. It consisted of one hut filled with three tier beds. Each had a filthy straw mattress and two blankets. I got the last empty beds. There were fellows in there with double pneumonia, frostbite, dysentery, boils, impetigo, and just about everything else. Even two cases of VD The meals here weren’t too bad. A bowl of porridge, one slice of bread, and a brew for breakfast; a bowl of thin soup and a brew for dinner; and two slices of Span and one average potato for supper, and also a brew and a bread spread. I was in hospital for two weeks getting clean dressings once a day. ((This would be some time in Mid-April)) . They had both Sulpha powder and penicillin there which came through the Red Cross.
Then I went into #2 Compound. Here I met my bomb aimer again,((Chuck Goddard)),my tail gunner , ((Bob Green)) who thought I was dead and a fellow I had been with for two years in the AF who had been shot down six days before I was. We had quite a reunion -- dry of course. My tail gunner had his right eye almost blinded by the chute when he bailed out. It took a big corner of skin out of the edge of his eye. He looked pretty thin but he had been hiding for four days and hadn’t anything to eat in that time. My chum was okay, but he was always thinking about food. After two days in the compound I was the same way. There were a thousand guys in there at first but a few days later it was two thousand. In this compound there was a communal mess and four sittings beginning at 7:00 a.m. until 11:00 a.m., then from 2:00 to 6:00 p.m. If you ate at 7, that was it until 2 when you had your last meal of the day. In the morning it was a bowl of porridge or prunes and raisins and a brew and a slice of bread and jam. In the afternoon it was some kind of soup, quite often “meat and beans” (hard white beans, lots of water and lots of little black bugs) and a slice of bread and German fish cheese. We also got a cigarette ration of fifty per week.
My bomb aimer, tail gunner , W/Op and Engineer slept on wooden boards in a tent which held something over two hundred men. They had two blankets apiece. My B/A was allergic to fleas and bed bugs and as a result was covered with bites. Some of the fellows saved the prune pits and after roasting them, cracked them and ate the bitter nut inside. They were awfully bitter.
The German news was posted every day and according to it the Americans were within fifty miles of the camp. On the 3rd of April we were told we were on the move.

Chapter 7 The forced march to Moosburg.

[TED/T]
Anyway, Alf White was with me and Chuck Goddard together. I think it was the second day out of Nuremberg these Americans, this crowd of American Thunderbolts flew across about a thousand feet or so in the air and we thought they were just going on and then the next thing they were pouring out of the sky and coming straight for us across the fields so low that the grass was flying and then we obviously knew what was coming so we all scattered and sure enough they were bombing and strafing , but it was, I’m certain by the length of time it went on and the number of aircraft involved that I think they realised at one stage who we were and then called it off I don’t think they’d really gone for us at the time cause we were about to pass under a railway bridge and to our right, in the trees, there was a goods train drawn up with flat bed trucks and strapped onto those were piles of what looked to me like Jet engines for their new two six two.

Some of the time they moved us in, through, the night, they were trying to shake off , because these Thunderbolts, obviously they reported back that we were there cause after that we used to get what turned out to be their photographic reconnaissance units, they were Mustangs , two would come, one would fly alongside obviously taking photographs while the other one was up protecting him..
Well actually I was about to retrack because I forgot something there about the Americans, so we’re going back to after we were strafed and they did hide us in barns overnight to try and put these photographic aircraft units off and we laid down one night and something woke me up, small cold feet on the side of my face, and it was rats as it turned out to be, feeding on the dead skin on the side of my face, this ultimately led me to have a tubercular gland there on that side of my face, it was the type, apparently that the doctor said attacks cattle I mention that because I did have a bit of trouble there but apart from that I just kept the wound clean and I was fit enough at that age when I could heal up, so we had times when we were locked up in barns for a whole day and night to try and put these photographic aircraft off.

I think our injuries and losses were insignificant compared with some columns, I’ve heard of one that at the time was marching through Regensburg when the Americans bombed it and we lost the lot so ours doesn’t seem to count as any (big thing)

[LEFTY]
The next morning all the rest of the camp set out on a march (about 10,000 of them) to Moosburg, another prison camp, 120 Kilos south of Nuremberg
We had just started moving when three American Thunderbolts flew over with two five hundred pound bombs apiece. We saw it start to dive just about where the boys on the march were. Later we found out three were killed and several injured. On the second day we arrived at a place called Ingolstadt after many delays caused by bombed out railway tracks. We had just left there when the air raid sirens went. We stopped as the Yanks were bombing everything that moved. A few minutes later the Fortresses started unloading their stuff over Ingolstadt. There were Mustangs flying low cover for them. As the Forts turned away for the target we saw three Mustangs start for the deck. Everyone was thinking “some b------s going to catch it”, and then they headed straight for us. Somebody hollered , “hit the deck” but by this time I was doing a ground hog act. The Mustangs opened up on the engine and were about to do the whole train when they must have noticed the P.O.W.’s painted on the side of the train as they peeled off and kept going. One South African had an arm blown off and a German guard got hit. We were lucky.

[ALF]
Before long, we commenced a long walk towards the south and I remember the first night of our move we marched throughout the night in the pouring rain and as dawn broke during one of our short periods of rest, I positioned myself on a low post and promptly fell asleep, despite this uncomfortable position, only to be rudely awakened very shortly by orders to move. Throughout that day we continued to march south, and about mid-day, greeted the arrival
overhead of a number of U.S.A.F. Thunderbolt fighter bombers, with loud cheers. I saw these planes commence to dive, and thought that they were acknowledging our presence there, but to my horror, as they got lower, their .5’s started to spout fire and bombs came from beneath them. I thought I could run fast, but I found that our escort could run faster! I threw myself into a very convenient ditch until the attack was over. We were then re-assembled. Unfortunately, some of my fellow P.O.W’s would not be marching any further, as they lay dead in the road, and quite a few more had been injured by the gunfire and bombs.
The journey south continued for the next few days and nights. I remember one of the nights was spent in a forest beneath the pine trees. I would not like to think that the howling of dogs we heard may have been wolves - most probably the noise was caused by farmer’s dogs guarding their owner’s property from the foraging P.O.W’s!
One day of the march I particularly remember was when we were passing through the countryside and, foolishly, a chicken tried to pass through the column of P.O.W’s. It never reached the other side alive, and for the next few miles, white feathers were fluttering around the column.
Obviously a message had been forwarded to the U.S.A.F. about their mistake of attacking our column, because for the remainder of our march we were provided each day with an escort of Thunderbolt and Mustang aircraft, thus illustrating the superiority of the allied airforces at this stage of the war.

Chapter 8 Life in the POW camp at Moosburg.

[LEFTY]
The next afternoon [5th April] we arrived at Stalag VII-A Mossburg and were happy to get behind wires again where it was safe. For a few days we were in the north compound but then went on a delousing parade and shower (the first since being at Kriegie) and into the main compound. The huts here were worse than Nuremberg. They were crawling with fleas, lice, bed bugs, and cockroaches, so the delousing didn’t help much. Here we were issued with one Red Cross parcel each week and had to cook our own food. There were no stoves so we made them out of tins. They looked like the one shown here. [13] and we spent most of the day cutting little bits of wood to burn. Six of us got together on our Red Cross parcels and ate together. We cooked our meals on two of these “Klim Can Burners”. We managed to purchase a “Klein” which was an aluminum jug about two feet high and eight inches around to cook our “glop” in. Glop consisted of prunes, raisons, dry bread, macaroni, crumbled biscuits, margarine, and sugar out of the Red Cross parcels, dumped into a gallon of water. We boiled hell out of this until it got thick. It took about two hours on the burners. This was one of our two meals for the day. The other consisted of a few potatoes and spam. We also had two or three brews a day and three slices of bread and spread. We didn’t eat too badly here.
Then I went into the hospital with an attack of appendicitis. If you were too sick to get up and make your meals you just had it. While I was in the hospital I bought a pair of sandals made by the Russians for three packages of French cigarettes and a pack of American. You could buy just about anything here for cigarettes. A Kilo loaf of rye bread was thirty cigarettes or one chocolate bar, fresh eggs -- five cigarettes apiece etc.
After I got out of the hospital we were moved to a large compound. The British and Canadians in separate barracks from the Americans which was a good thing ,as the Yanks were always quarreling over food and everything else. The boys on the march from Nuremberg arrived two weeks after we did. They came into the camp pushing old fashioned baby buggies, carts and what have you to carry their food and clothing. They had scrounged everything they could get their hands on.

[ALF]
Our march was ended when we arrived at the P.O.W. camp at Moosburg (Stalag 7) and once again we settled down into the routine of a P.O.W. camp, which consisted largely of bartering for food, baiting the goons and sleeping. Whilst in this camp I had my first experience of a low -flying
jet aircraft, because some days, a Messcherschmitt 262 flew backwards and forwards over the camp and the pilot seemed to take great delight in frightening the inmates. The sound of his aircraft was very much like the arrival of a heavy bomb and invariably caused most of the kriegies to dive for the nearest cover.
I had been in Moosberg only about a fortnight when the sounds of war became nearer and nearer, and the inevitable rumours went round the camp as to what was going to happen to us. I certainly did not relish the thought of yet another march away from the war zone. One day, word was passed around that in fact we would not be moved, but would await the arrival of the allied forces, and at the end of April 1945.

[TED/T]
We were in Moosburg for quite a while, we came to the second Prisoner of War camp at Moosburg , it probably might be three weeks away or something like that and anyway apart from scares of seeing and hearing aircraft where we scattered there was no other attack on us although it was really frightening, as soon as you heard an aircraft you all scattered, you went round the backs of houses, we pushed on.
I’m trying to think ,at one stage there was an attempt by, an escape committee was set up, a group of people would go one night rather than a lot of people go which would make it awkward now my rear gunner was with a group that did escape one night and they were away a day or something like that and then the rear gunner came back in with a story that the SS had found them, had shot half of them and put the other half back in. Eventually got to this place called Moosburg and who’s ever in charge announced there’s a Stalaag there and an Offlag. The Stalaag is for non-commissioned and the Offlag is for officers, that they needed a couple of Sergeants to look after things for the Senior British Officer, make his bed and that sort of thing, and well we thought that if we volunteered for that we’d be in the same compound as Chuck and Lefty so which we did so we were in the same block, same hut as Lefty and Chuck and later, I can’t remember how many days it would be, an American armoured column once again way ahead of its support came to our rescue as it were and came in to the compound then of course they disappeared again and it got a bit exciting because the German guards had gone by this time and there was Germans in the village nearby and there was a church tower from which they could see the compound and there was sniping by the compound . I’ve no knowledge of them actually hitting anybody but a bit later the officer, the American artillery men arrived and they were firing shells for a couple of days, it was like express train after express train passing over us, we didn’t know at the time but apparently some information had got through that the SS guards were trying to get back in to wipe us out
So this was quite a lot of activity, artillery shells going over, and also American, I don’t know if there were any British, but they were mainly Thunderbolts, they were dive bombing and strafing all around us, mainly to one side, to try and shield us , it was quite heavy, it wasn’t just the odd one or two, they were diving and they were coming over and following each other, G-d knows how many aircraft they had in the air to protect us
Chapter 9 The Liberation by the Americans.

[TED/T]
Then eventually their Army came up and liberated us and jeeps then came through. The thing I always remember about that was this jeep drove in and everybody knew that these jeeps had got bars of emergency chocolate, quite dark, big bars and there were quite a crowd round this jeep with two officers in it and I took a run at him and I jumped, cleared all these people, landed in the jeep rooted around as fast as I could, found three bars of chocolate ,threw one to the crowd ,leaped out of the other side and was gone , it was all in a flash, very quickly, so Alf and I had two big bars of chocolate each.

[LEFTY]
On the 29th of April about nine a.m. two Mustangs came low over the camp, dipping their wings and putting on a show for us. Then one of the towers opened up on them so they got a little height and came down at the tower. Things happened fast. Three American tanks on a hill about a mile away started shelling the German guards’ quarters on the edge of the camp and a German machine gun on a church steeple started spraying the camp. Everyone headed for the slit trenches and the outhouse.
I took the outhouse as the walls on it were at least a foot thick cement. This went on for two and a half hours and then an American tank rolled into the camp.
We were liberated. English, French, Russian and American flags appeared from nowhere and the Stars and Stripes were run up over the camp.
(Lloyd was back in Canada before his 21st birthday)

[ALF]
I was delighted to see American tanks, manned by G.I’s arriving beside the camp. Before long, the Americans were in the compound and we were enjoying the luxury of hot showers and plenty of food with which they provided us.

Chapter 10 The survivors return home.

[TED/T]
It was left to the Yanks (to organise us) they flew us to airports near Regensburg, it was a Luftwaffe station, I shall always remember that, there was quit a lot of stuff left in a big building which was a dormitory or stores , you were a bit afraid as this stuff was all mixed up and there was so much booby trapped in those days , incidentally before we went there we went out for a walk to a local village and Alf and I were walking across a field and I could see a lovely new rifle, obviously a German one and I drew Alf’s attention to it and he made as if to go to it and I said ‘leave it alone’ cause it might have been booby trapped and we went on then, had a walk around this village and we found an old mill of some sort, that’s right it was a mill cause on the floor there was a heap of grain, once again I had a sort of sense that there was something buried underneath that, you were tempted to have a look, we came to a steep staircase down underground and it went straight down and I could see some sort of picture right at the bottom of it, it was a door with a Norman arch over it and a huge padlock on it, we went down to have a look at it. Eventually Alf knocked the padlock off it and we went in, it was a tool store and Alf, he being in carpentry, he took a couple of planes and whatnot and I took a plane, some drills, some pliers and as far as the pliers are concerned I’ve still got a pair of those to this day and probably some of the drills as well. You could have kitted a good workshop out of that , anyway to get back to the Americans who were liberating us and then we went on to this Forming waiting there to be flown out, they were moving all the Americans first, we were in tents, no we weren’t, sorry, that was later on, we were just laying out in the field, out in the airdrome, we did get an issue of American type combat rations and a lot of it was with tins of meat and veg and so we lived on these for a bit to the extent that when we got home that was the sort of standard issue at home on the rations and I couldn’t stand the sight of it, it made me sick just to smell it , anyway we had this, enough to keep us going.
When we were going to be flown out , so we were told that we were going and there were a lot of displaced persons around, I think they were displaced and they new that we were being flown home and there was a lot of this foodstuff laying around and there’s one of them came up and wanted our loose tins and we weren’t sure so Alf stabbed them all, he let them have them but he stabbed all the tins, so the chap would have to eat them right away if he was hungry but he couldn’t sell them on. Then we got on that aircraft and was flown down to Nancy and then taken to the village market square in Nancy with big marquees there, all set up there, they laid out white cloths and cutlery and they fed us proud, all the local lasses were feeding us and then we went to a chateau and they had all the German prisoners of war sweeping the floors, washing up, but the time went on and we got a little bit browned off and I don’t know where we got the information from but there was a Red Cross train in a siding opposite on its way down to the coast so we decided to go and have a look, sure enough it was and so we decided to do a bunk, Alf and I got on this Red Cross train and I don’t know how many days we were on it but at one time it finished up in the sidings and a goods train came alongside and that’s the way they used to transport wine in France and the truck was actually a huge barrel on its side with a bung underneath, obviously, and this was all chained up and padlocked and there were some Indians on the train and they managed to get on or more of these undone so the whole train had buckets and buckets of red wine it was raw but everybody drank it then eventually we finished up at Le Havre, got on the American airfield at Le Havre, we were in tents there, probably for a day or so and then we got flown out of there to an airfield in Southern England which I can’t remember where it was , it might have been Lynne or somewhere like that and there we got off and immediately the Red Cross were there giving us toiletries and cigarettes and we had a medical there , an immediate medical, we were just lined up and passed doctors and so on, they were doing really sort of field surgery there. I had two small shell splinters in my leg and they’d gone septic and he got a scalpel and cut them and then just joined the two holes up, it didn’t hurt as much as I thought it was going to but I think there was an Army chap next to me in the line and you got something to lean on and hold on to and he just grabbed hold of my arm to try and comfort me as this chap was cutting my leg open , anyway you got that and it was dressed

[ALF]
It seemed like an eternity, but after two days, the American Forces provided us with transport to a nearby airfield and from there we were flown home via Nancy and Le Havre to the UK, where to my joy, I found that Bud had also survived. The only one of my crew killed was Jack, the Mid-Upper Gunner.
At this stage of the war the communications were obviously chaotic and on my arrival back in the UK a message was sent to my Mother telling her of this. This was the first intimation she had that I was alive, it having been reported by other crews from my squadron that we had exploded over the target with no chance of survival of any of the crew.
After a medical check-up and interrogation at RAF Cosford, I was sent on leave, and re-united with my family.

My Royal Airforce number was 1852534. I joined on 8th March 1943 and was demobbed on 12th March 1947.