Remembering the Horrors of Dunkirk and being a POW

[Captain Hilts]

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/editors-choice/2010/05/16/dunkirk-survivor-on-horror-of-troops-stranded-after-evacuation-86908-22262638/

...
Thousands of PoWs were frogmarched through France and Germany to camps in Poland. It took two months in often sweltering heat, with little food or water. David said: "Hundreds died on that march. It was terrible. We were eating buttercups and bloody daisies, nettles, anything.

In Poland, David was held in an old fort, walls green with damp. Weak and starving, he contracted gastroenteritis, twice. He said: "Apparently I was screaming my head offfor a week." He was sent to a farm near Danzig (now Gdansk) where he worked for over two years, regaining his strength despite almost being bayoneted by a guard for refusing to eat with the animals.

...
But as Russian troops advanced, the PoWs were rounded up and forcemarched again, this time in deep snow and going nine days without food. After a night sleeping in the open, David and two others hid in a ditch as the snow covered them. He escaped because he realised he'd die if he didn't. The escapees stayed in abandoned farms en-route to the front line.
One night they heard tanks coming. David said: "By the time we were up and dressed it was too late. We thought they were Russians - but it was the SS."

David and the others were lined up before a firing squad: "I said 'Say a prayer, lads,' and then this Wehrmacht officer came on the scene, an ordinary soldier, and he stopped it. He handed us on to another lot and we were taken back more or less to where we'd started from." They were finally liberated, not by the Russians but by the Seaforth Highlanders.

[dipsydoodle]

1. One of my pals years ago

was a WW2 POW. The Germans made him a cook for the camp guards. He used to breed mice on the side so's he could put mouse shit in with their food. :rofl:

Another local guy I knew was German. He was captured in France by the Yanks when he was 16 years old, shipped to the USA and put to work cotton picking whatever. He was later shipped back to the UK and put to work harvesting carrots etc. By the end of the war he'd got an english girlfriend and stayed here which is how I got to know him in the early 1980's.

[Captain Hilts]

2. A good number of POWs held in North Am stayed. Germans in Canada, Italians

in South Carolina.

[pinboy3niner]

3. I spent some time hospitalized with a Korean War POW

He was alone in a two-bed room on our floor of an Army hospital and had few, if any, visitors, so I would stop by to talk to him (and his doctors encouraged the visits).

He was hospitalized for medical treatment, but it was obvious that he also suffered from OCD. He washed his hands compulsively--so frequently that they were always red and raw. I learned that, as a POW, he had a regular camp work assignment. His job was picking up and disposing of human feces with his bare hands.

I don’t think OCD is normally associated with PTSD (and at that time, in 1970, PTSD was not even recognized as a disorder). In my friend’s case, however, there was a literal connection between his compulsion and his experience in captivity nearly 20 years earlier.

[Captain Hilts]

4. Oh, gee. That one hurts. nt