Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú

Written on behalf of Archie(bald) Greenshields by Bognor Library.

29 May 1940

The advance of the Germans… I was in France, I had gone to France at the age of 19 as war started and served with the Second Battalion The Buffs, Royal East Kent Regiment. We were on the borders of France and Belgium and the Germans advanced and we went into action and I was hit by a bullet which ruined my right (trigger) hand. I went to get first aid and morters and shells were falling I was wounded in the chest, legs bits of shrapnel in my chest and out under my arm, my leg was wounded. People from the section I was with put me on an ambulance, this was in a convoy of ambulances picking up wounded people, We stopped for a Stuka raid and we were taken off for safely. Stuka's hit the ambulance and when I came round the ambulance was in flames and I was left behind. Most of that day I was taken prisoner. …

My life as a prisoner was just like any other prisoner, hard work, poor food, misery. …

After about 4 1/2 years towards the end of the war the Russians advanced and were in danger of getting into the camp and the Germans put us on the road… as with thousands of others in January 1945, coldest winter on record, and marched us for the next four or five months in extreme conditions until the weather got warmer. It was awful I cannot describe the agony. I had dysentry, semi-recovered from the dysentry, I was dropped out of the march and was picked up and put on a cattle truck in a station, load of prisoners all with black stripes on their pyjamas and every so often they stopped and threw the dead people out on the side of the track. We woke up one morning extreme cold in this truck and when the light came through the slits in the cattle truck sides, I found another man who was with me who was British and the prisoners had escaped through the night. The door opened of the truck and the guards came in and we had the devils own job persuading them not to shoot us.

While they were cross examining us, because they thought that being British we must have helped them, and we heard a British bugle call coming across the wind which was in the right direction. This saved us. It affected us so much that we got down on our knees and they let us go.

To this camp… Americans and British. Big air raid, I suppose about 1000 planes. It is a matter of historical record. We were on the outskirts of Nurenburg which gives you some idea how far we had walked from Katvitz, 700 miles about, marching all the way. 2 days later the march started again. For seven to ten days we were sleeping in cow sheds, I was having a wash at a farm pump and it was very noisy and then suddenly it was silence. We all rushed to the gate of the farm and an American soldier came along and days as a prisoner were over. Within about seven days we were put on planes and flown home.

Most poignant thing was a Salvation Army girl, in the old uniform, standing at the bottom of the plane step. "Welcome home, son, send this home to your mum" with a postcard with a stamp on. We were taken to a large house somewhere in the Chalfont St. Giles area, somewhere up there and were all cleaned up etc before they let us go home.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.