Home again – at last! (8th to 18th May 1945)

I suspect that with each succeeding 8th May, fewer and fewer people remember that that date is the anniversary of VE Day, the day when, in Europe, World War II ended and the metaphorical bluebirds of Vera Lynn’s popular wartime song could at last spread their wings ‘over the white cliffs of Dover’. It is not a date that I am ever likely to forget.

On 8th May 1945 I was in Sudetenland, the disputed borderland between Germany and Czechoslovakia. I was one of a small party of 30 British prisoners of war from a working camp in Zittau in eastern Germany who, amid the thunder of gunfire, had marched southwards on the previous day into the Sudeten Mountains, away from the inexorable advance of the Soviet Army.

Joined by other POWs being evacuated from the battle area, we had spent the previous night in a barn high in the mountains. In the bitter chill of early morning we continued our march, with heavy firing going on all around us. Halfway through the morning our guards called us together and announced that they had heard on the radio that the war was over.

SS Units, members of Hitler’s elite corps, were – as was all too evident - fighting on in that area but they were not members of the SS. They threw away their rifles and told us that they intended to change into civilian clothes and make their way to their homes as quickly as possible. They suggested that we should do the same, and we needed no second bidding!

We decided to make for Prague where, so we heard, Czechs had revolted against German occupation and had liberated the town before the arrival of Soviet forces. At first we set out in a column but split into groups of no more than two or three when we found ourselves coming under air attack from both sides. Soviet pilots imagined that we were a German column while the pilots of German aircraft, flying westwards to surrender to the British or Americans, emptied their machine gun magazines on what I suppose they thought were Soviet troops.

Jim Palmer, the former Ipswich milk roundsman who had been with me in the army and throughout our captivity, and I stayed together. Walking and cadging lifts in the backs of lorries fleeing southwards, we spent the night on a Czech farm just outside Leitmeritz (now Litomerice), which was believed to be occupied by Soviet forces. The following morning we saw German stragglers withdrawing past the farm and heard that the fighting in and around Leitmeritz was over.

The Czech farmer gave us a lift into town. It was in turmoil. Jubilant Czechs decked Soviet tanks with garlands and offered what little food and drink they had to the crews. The German civilian population was hunted out and driven ruthlessly from the town. How quickly the persecuted can turn themselves into persecutors!

Leitmeritz swarmed with Russian troops. I saw a Czech shop-keeper tearing his hair because a freed Ukrainian slave worker was looting his shop. A Soviet officer halted his staff car and strode into the shop drawing his pistol from its holster. There was a loud report and he strode out again, buckling up his holster.

Jim and I were glad that we had learned from Soviet fellow-prisoners in Zittau, sufficient Russian to explain that we were Anglishki Tovarischi (English comrades) and were on our way home to England. We found that a warm smile, a smart British Army style salute, and a few hesitant Russian words were always enough to ensure that we were waved on our way.

A train – the first post-war train from Leitmeritz to Prague – pulled out of the station in the afternoon. Jim and I were on board – so were hundreds of others. Crowded into carriages, into corridors and even onto the roofs of carriages were returning POWs and civilian workers of every allied nationality. It was a hair-raising journey over temporarily repaired track and hurriedly mended bridges.

We arrived in Prague in the dawn. Every building seemed bullet-scarred but the people were jubilant. Boy scouts in uniform and monks and nuns in their austere habits found accommodation for returning POWs and ‘displaced persons’. Jim and I were shown to a comfortable room (it’s true that the windows had bullet holes!) in the Hotel Atlantic in what was then called (though I’m sure that the name was changed within days) ‘Deutschherrenstrasse’.

The following day, after our first good night’s sleep in freedom, we mingled with the crowds in Wenceslas Square. They were hourly expecting the return of their exiled President, the ill-fated Edouard Benes. We heard that a train was expecting to leave that afternoon for Pilsen, said to be occupied by American troops.

We made our way to the station and crammed ourselves onto the train which, after a seemingly interminable delay, steamed south-westward through Prague’s suburbs into open country. As darkness was falling, miles from anywhere, we were told we’d have to walk from the Soviet to the American zone and pick up another train there. Fifteen minutes walk along a forest road brought us to a barrier across the track manned by a solitary Russian soldier. There were scores of us – British, Americans, French, Poles, Czechs and Germans – all trying to get through to the American lines.

The sentry, not unreasonably, said that he couldn’t see who we were in the dark. We’d have to come back in the morning. This didn’t suit some returning American POWs who insisted that they had every right to go through the barrier. The unfortunate sentry, who clearly didn’t want to be held personally responsible for the outbreak of World War III weakened. He gestured. Anglishki and Americanski could go through. Jim and I walked up to him, said ‘Anglishki’ and passed through the barrier. So did a fair proportion of the cosmopolitan crowd behind us!

Another barrier, manned by a gum-chewing GI, and we were through into the American zone. We all spent the night, huddled together for warmth, on the floor of the main room of a forest inn. In those hectic times it didn’t occur to any of us that one normally actually paid for train journeys and overnight accommodation!

In the morning twenty minutes walk brought us to another railway halt where a train waited to take us to Pilsen. Here there were American army lorries. We piled into the back and were driven at breakneck speed to Regensburg in Bavaria. We passed small towns and villages reduced to rubble, over which still hung the smell of death. There were others, still standing, where white sheets or towels hung from every window in token of surrender.

There was a long and frustrating wait on Regensburg’s airfield while returning POWs were sorted into nationalities by American military police. Eventually Jim and I found ourselves, with other Britons, on a Dakota, taking us over the shell pock-marked recent battlefields of western Europe, to Rheims. Here, at a British transit camp, we were dusted with DDT, given a shower, new underclothes and uniform, and subjected to preliminary documentation.

To us the camp was the acme of comfort and the food superb, though it must be said that we weren’t inclined to be critical. Someone had had the thoroughly tasteless idea of providing German POWs to wait on us – to polish our boots, make our beds and perform any other menial tasks we cared to give them. Most of us found ourselves identifying with the German prisoners. We had been slave labourers ourselves too recently to enjoy seeing other POWs, of whatever nationality, forced into servitude.

Did we spend one night there or two? I can’t recall. A lifetime’s experiences seemed to have been crammed into just a few days. Nowadays I suspect that returning POWs who had been away from home for four years and prisoners for nearly three of them, would be subjected to psychiatric assessment and ‘counselling’ before being let loose on the public. Things were ordered differently in 1945!

Jim and I, with another party of British ex-POWs, flew back in the belly of a Wellington bomber to an airfield and another transit camp in Buckinghamshire. More DDT dusting, more documentation, a medical examination that found me fitter than I had ever been, and we were given some back pay, railway warrants, ration cards (double rations, I recall, for a month!) and a leave pass.

Jim and I stepped off the train at Ipswich station at about 9.30 p.m. on 18th May 1945 – just ten days after VE Day. It was, by a happy coincidence, my twenty-fourth birthday – and I was home again!
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