Parachutes, prison camps and Red Cross parcels
Waterloo woman tells the story of her dad, an airman who spent 900 days as a POW
WATERLOO — On the evening of Oct. 8, 1942, Flight Sgt. Cameron Hill of Kitchener, a 21-year-old gunner and observer serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force, clambered into his Wellington bomber with five crewmates for a night raid out on the desert airbase at El Alamein, about 100 kilometres east of Alexandria in Egypt.
At about 3 a.m., the plane was shot down while flying over Tobruk in Libya. An engine caught fire and lost a propeller. The crew of six sent out an SOS and parachuted out, leaping into the dark desert sky while their plane, named G-George, hurtled in flames into the sand below.
Four of the crew met by the wreck, and began to walk east, toward the British base 800 kilometres away. But injuries forced two to drop out and wait by the railway tracks to be picked up as prisoners.
The other two embarked on an epic journey across the desert, making their way back to base after 27 days, subsisting on four tins of corned beef and water taken from the radiators of wrecked tanks and trucks.
The fate of the final two crew members, an Australian pilot named Bowhill and Hill, the lanky, blue-eyed Kitchener boy, was unknown.
A week after the crash, a letter came to Hill’s parents at home on Simeon Street, with the dreadful news that their son was missing in action.
It would be another five months before they learned he was still alive.
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As a kid growing up in Kitchener, Barbara Hill and her brothers were always intrigued by “Dad’s war box,” a mysterious box tucked in a closet under the stairs.
The box contained memories from Cam Hill’s wartime service and his 2 ½ years as a prisoner of war, in Libya, Italy, Austria and Germany. It held his leather flying helmet, a compass on a wristband, metal and wooden tags with his Stalag prisoner number, even the tin eating tray that was part of his mess kit.
It also had his wartime log, with handwritten observations and sketches of life in a POW camp. There were clippings from The Kitchener Daily Record, which closely documented the impact of the war on local families, and every postcard and letter he wrote home during the war, lovingly preserved by his parents as they awaited his return.
But the kids had no real idea about Hill’s wartime experience. They knew he couldn’t abide turnips, or bread with caraway seeds, foods associated with his years as a PoW. They only ever ate macaroni and cheese — a favourite — on nights when Hill was not home for dinner.
So last year, after Barbara retired, she decided to finally ferret out the wartime story of her dad, who died in 1988. Her investigations led her to publish “From Kitchener to Cairo: One Airman’s Story as a WWII Prisoner of War.” She made 20 copies for family members.
“I really wanted to understand that piece of his life that we knew nothing about,” she said from her home in Waterloo. “I was almost embarrassed that I didn’t know more. I just knew he started in North Africa and ended up in northern Germany.”
She learned of his early training, his capture, his years spent in almost a dozen prison camps, sometimes in desperate conditions marked by dysentery, constant hunger and boredom, and ending in a 27-day forced march that took him 328 kilometres across northern Germany. *****
Hill’s wartime story began when school ended in June 1940 and he signed up with his buddy Jimmie Brown, using a letter of reference from his principal at Kitchener-Waterloo Collegiate.
After a year of training, he went to England. His letters home were filled with the ebullience of youth and the delights of seeing a bit of the world: London, Edinburgh, Gibraltar and Cairo. He had his photo taken in front of the Sphinx, and in the Cairo bazaar he bought his mother a piece of silver filigree jewelry, which arrived safely to her.
It wasn’t all fun and games, though. His flying log records 26 combat missions after he shipped to Egypt.
And then, on Oct. 8, everything changed.
After bailing out of the burning bomber, Hill and his crewmate got separated from the others but, like them, resolutely began heading east to their base. They managed to steal a truck, and had gone about 100 kilometres before they were captured and sent back to Tobruk, the base they’d been sent to bomb.
He’d spend 932 days as a prisoner of war in 11 different camps in Libya, Italy, Austria, Germany and Poland, travelling almost 7,000 kilometres in the hold of a freighter, in cattle cars or on daylong marches. He suffered from lice and fleas, dysentery and malaria, boredom, homesickness and hunger.
In 1954, the War Claims Commission determined Hill merited compensation for “unusually severe malnutrition,” for transport in cattle cars and for the 27-day hunger march. He was compensated only for time spent in German camps, and was docked for three days of freedom during a brief escape. For the suffering he endured, he eventually received $565.80 — worth $4,807 today.
Hill spent a month in prison in Libya, in conditions he says were “far worse” than anything he endured later. He was then shipped to Italy, marking his 22nd birthday in the hold of a freighter with about 1,000 men on “a seven-day trip that was hell”.
In March 1943 — 75 years ago this month — Hill’s parents got word that their son was alive and in a PoW camp — more than five months after first receiving word that he was missing.
In the Italian camp, Hill was able to write to his parents, though it would be six months before they began receiving each other’s letters. In those first letters, he reassured them, and said he was receiving weekly parcels from the Red Cross.
Those parcels, he wrote, “supply all the real sustaining foods such as tinned meat, butter and chocolate … and all the little luxuries such as jam and tea and sweets and so on.” He was so grateful he asked his parents to make a Red Cross contribution from his war pay.
He regularly wrote unrelentingly positive letters. In March 1943, he writes “to let you know we’re still going STRONG. Hoping to get some of your letters any day now. Let’s hope it will be over soon.”
Some of his worries came through, Barbara notes. “I think the lonely parts were when he kept inquiring about his girlfriend and his dear friend Jimmie (who unbeknownst to Hill was killed in 1942), and his siblings. He asked a lot about them.”
Frequent prison transfers meant the mail that was such a lifeline came irregularly. Months might go by with no mail, and then he might get 18 letters all at once.
Those delays meant he was sometimes unaware of important news. His mother Grace died in June 1943 but he didn’t learn of her death until 10 months later. He continued to write to “Mother and Dad” for almost another year.
Almost every letter and entry in his wartime log mentions food — a preoccupation that hints at the perennial hunger. At one point, he figured he weighed no more than 120 pounds.
Parcels from the Red Cross and home provided vital food, socks and other supplies, and cigarettes, the currency in the camps used to buy and sell items like chocolate, tinned milk or jam. A haircut in the camp cost 10 cigarettes. Italians guards punctured each food tin in the parcels to make sure they weren’t stockpiled for escape attempts.
Prisoners wasted nothing from the parcels. The plywood from the crates was fashioned into chairs, the tins became cooking pots and tin mugs, tin chests, even ingenious stoves that could boil water “in no time.” The paper lining the foil in cigarette packs was used to make paper airplanes.
In September 1943, after Italy surrendered, Hill’s family naively assumed he would soon be repatriated. In fact, it would be almost two more years before he came home. In the transfer to German control, Hill and a buddy were able to jump off a train in Salzburg in Austria, enjoying three days of freedom before being recaptured.
Life in the German Stalag camps was harder than under the Italians. During one two-month period, Hill has only one entry in his log: “No parcels, no smokes, no nothing, things are grim.”
In early 1945, Hill joined the 80,000 PoWs forced to march across Poland, Czechoslovakia and Germany. Almost 3,500 PoWs died on the forced cross-country marches. Hill marched for 27 days and 328 kilometres, ending up 70 kilometres from where he began.
Freedom came on May 2, when Hill’s march was met by British troops. He celebrated the German surrender with chicken and champagne, fireworks and a badly needed haircut. He was flown to England three days later, where he reunited with his brother Eugene for the first time in five years.
Once home, he studied business at the University of Toronto, joined the family firm, Bernardo Hill Tile & Terrazzo, and became a husband and father. He served on the school board, and the boards of the YMCA and of his church, Trinity United.
“He was a very gracious man. There were no rough edges,” Barbara said. “He was very active in the community. I think he did that because he had the freedom to do that. It was freedom he’d fought for.”
He kept in touch with fellow PoWs, some of whom became lifelong friends. He never wore his war medals, which stayed in the war box, unattached to their ribbons and in their original boxes. She suspects “it was a combination of humility, unpleasant memories and that he avoided recognition at all cost.”
The hardest part of the project was learning of his suffering, she said. “I cried a lot. I wish we’d been able to fully appreciate what he went through. We just lived in this bubble. We were just kids that were born into this free world, and had no idea what they went through to make sure we had that.”
That’s partly why she wrote the book, to preserve one man’s story, and to remember his service. “The cost was high. It was very high.”