How my Dad survived the long march to a brutal PoW camp
MY FATHER George Needs was just 19 and heading with his unit to the beach at Dunkirk to get back home, but they were delayed by enemy fire and missed the ships and hundreds of Little Ships that had come to rescue the troops.
Their German captors marched him and his unit to a field, told them kneel and put their hands behind their heads. Fearing the worst, he took a chance to escape and hid in bushes near a farm.
A local family gave him food and clothes so he could dress like a Frenchman and pointed him in the right direction to escape. When he left, they wrote to his mother to tell her he was trying to head back to Britain.
Later my father was captured again and with other prisoners was made to march hundreds of miles through the snow into Poland — those who dropped to the ground with exhaustion were shot.
When my father tried to give a bar of soap to a Polish woman and her baby, he had his teeth knocked out with the butt of a German guard’s rifle.
He was held prisoner until 1945 at Stalag XX1-D, near Poznan. When his best friend refused to stop whistling, a German guard put his rifle in his mouth and shot him.
The War Office had sent a telegram to my father’s mother in July 1940 to say he was missing, then she received propaganda pictures of my father and other prisoners playing in a PoW band to show they were being ‘well looked after’.
The men would use pages of the Bible and stuffing out of their mattresses to make ‘cigarettes’. Over the five years they were captive, some smoked their way through a whole mattress and Bible.
When the camp was liberated by the Americans, they offered the prisoners the use of their rifles and said they could shoot the German guards. My father never told us whether he did or not.
When I was growing up, he rarely talked about the war. My mother told us that during the first fall of snow after he returned home from the camp, he was found outside the house marching up the road, not knowing where he was going.
I think he was suffering from delayed shock and was having a flashback.