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Stalag IVB (at Mühlberg on what became the border to East Germany) in the latter years of WW2 would not have been a popular destination, with up to 30,000 prisoners of war crammed into freezing and filthy wooden huts teeming with rats and fleas. These camps were often referred to as ‘Death’s Waiting Room’, and such were the atrocious conditions, many inmates simply lost the will to live. Maintaining morale was vital for survival, and all sorts of schemes were concocted to boost flagging spirits. One such was the ‘Mühlberg Motor Club’ (MMC) which came into being to revive the zest for life of the many motoring enthusiasts in the camp.
Such was the uptake of the concept that Tom Swallow, the president of the club, suggested they produce their own magazine. The club’s committee enthusiastically took up the idea, and PatHarrington Johnson, who was a journalist in his native South Africa, became editor. Other committee members stepped into roles of Diesel and Sports Car experts, while Bill Trevvett became the staff artist. Club chairman Arthur Pill was given the title of Production Manager, which, given the squalid working environment, was a tough task indeed. There was no paper, pens or pencils, all of which had to be purloined from the camp’s
masters. The marvellous illustrations had to be produced by making up dyes from whatever could be scrounged, giving a classic water colour effect. The prisoners’ staple diet of millet soup was found to be able to be transformed into a suitable glue for sticking pages into school exercise books, and these “magazines” became Flywheel, the masthead of the MMC, subtitled “Keeps the works going round on the idle strokes”.
It took two months of exceptionally hard graft before the first issue was produced, hand-written, illustrated and collated in a room shared with
200 other occupants, all of whom were busy on projects of their own. As each issue was finished, it was loaned to prisoners on a half-day basis, after which it was passed on. Despite taking extreme care, one issue was virtually destroyed when a cup of cocoa was spilled on it, necessitating painstaking restoration and the creation of replacement pages. Gradually other resources came to hand, including contributions from Isle of Man TT winner and editor of the weekly British magazine Motor Cycling Graham Walker (father of Murray), who sent copies of road tests which were then bound between hard covers, and became part of the MMC library. Other people sent cuttings from newspapers and magazines to keep the inmates in touch with the outside world. Ten issues of Flywheel had been produced (Number 11 was in production) when the war reached
Mühlberg and the Soviets took over the camp, but life did not improve for the unfortunate POWs. After devouring the last potatoes, the prisoners were on the verge of starvation when they were marched 25km to Riesa, about 40km northwest of Dresden, where they were abandoned until picked up by the advancing Americans. Many were near death and it is a miracle that any copies of Flywheel, let alone the poor prisoners, survived. But they did, and original examples were given to the Imperial War Museum in London for safekeeping. Many of the Flywheel committee suffered extremely poor health post-war as a result of their treatment and shocking diet, but in 1987, Tom Swallow and Arthur Pill arranged to have issues 5 to 10 produced as a book (ISBN 1-874723- 21-4). This was published by Fraser Stewart Books. If you look on the internet at sites such as Abebooks copies do come up for sale at reasonable prices, so if you can find a copy, grab it and marvel at the courage and indomitable spirit (not to mention the talent in producing the artwork and physically turning out the original magazine) of those remarkably resilient people who overcame persecution and punishment all those years ago. Thanks to Tim Parry for providing a copy of the 1987 book for this review. ‚