There are many bricks in the veterans memorial plaza where I live in Texas each with a different name and a different story. The brick I want to talk about looks a bit different than the rest and I hope to explain why, and why it sits with all the others.
It all started with a trip to Hawaii to celebrate our 40th anniversary. My wife and I flew to Honolulu a day early so that we could visit the USS Arizona Memorial before we headed off on a seven day islands cruise. We got on the coach to Pearl Harbor early in the morning and were entertained by our driver with multiple tales of the islands and tourists like ourselves. When he asked for questions one of our numbers asked him why so many Japanese visited the Arizona Memorial. I must admit to a moment of apprehension anticipating his answer but when it came it was quite unlike my unworthy expectations. He asked us all to think about how our world was changed by the Pearl Harbor attack and how the world was changed for the Japanese too. As I thought about his question I thought about my father and his circumstances on December 7th 1941.
In December 1941 my mother and father were not yet engaged, far less married and I was not yet born. In fact I was not even a twinkle since I was not born until 1949. On Pearl Harbor day my father was in a German Army POW camp in Torun, Poland (Camp 17 of Stalag_XX_A as I recall). Absent the attack his prospects of ever returning home to Scotland alive were vanishingly remote. It goes without saying that such a failure to return home would have seen my parents unmarried and me unborn.
The story of how he finished up as a POW is a tragic one, quite embarrassing to Winston Churchill’s reputation and greatly forgotten by military historians of WWII both in the USA and UK. He volunteered for the army in September 1939 the week that war was declared in the UK. He was inducted into the Seaforth Regiment and sent to Fort George, near Inverness in Scotland. After only 3 months training he was issued a Lee Enfield bolt action rifle and 100 rounds of .303 ammunition and shipped out to France in January 1940 in the 4th Battalion Seaforths, part of the 51st Highland Division. The division was eventually stationed at the northern end of the Maginot Line near Metz, quite separate from the rest of the British Army. Those readers who are military historians will realize that the 51st HD location was a precarious one, although they didn’t know that at the time but soon would.
When the Phony War ended and the real shooting started around May 10th 1940 the main German armored thrust landed north of the 51st HD, went through Sedan and onward to the English Channel coast near Calais, cutting the 51st off from the rest of the British Army. Elements of the 51st division did take part in supporting French armor assaults northward into the flank of the German penetration but without air support and after the German anti-tank forces worked out how to disable the heavily armored French tanks, these all failed.
The rest of the British Army was famously evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk between May 27th and June 4th leaving the 51st HD the only British division left fighting in France (the 50th division was in the process of landing at Cherbourg but were soon turned around and sent back to the UK). The 51st, including my father, fell back along the line of the river Somme arriving near St Valery sur Somme on the English Channel coast by May 28th. They were soon engaged by strong mechanized and infantry forces. The danger of being outflanked by German armor on the right drove them slowly back toward their bases of supply at Le-Havre and Rouen. When these bases were cut off they fell back to St Valery-en-Caux on the channel coast where they attempted to hold a perimeter while awaiting to be rescued by sea. But rescue became impossible when the beaches came under direct artillery fire. They might have been saved if earlier action had been taken but Churchill had delayed efforts to rescue the 51st and to keep them in the fight as a political bargaining tool with the French to keep them from capitulating; now it was too late.
On June 12th 1940 the French forces supporting them surrendered and, absent food, fuel, ammunition and medical supplies, and with no embarkation possible the 51st was surrendered to the famous German general Erwin Rommel. The 10,000 men of the division, mostly Scottish, were marched off as POWs to an uncertain future. At the time of this surrender the 51st Highland Division was surrounded by the 5th and 7th armored divisions, the 2nd motorized division, the 11th motorized brigade, the 57th, 31st, 12th, and 32nd infantry divisions of the German Army. A small force did escape through German lines to Le-Havre and returned to the UK but my father was not one of the fortunate ones.
He and his buddies were stripped of all that was valuable the marched eastward toward Germany. Besides marching they were carried in coal barges, in trucks and finally by train in cattle cars to Torun, Poland which is near Gdansk, or Danzig as it was called in those days. Here they entered into the German camp system, in his case as a private soldier. They were organized by service, rank and nationality. The British were treated better than most, albeit not all that well. They were issued rations of 1/5th of a loaf of black bread and a bowl of soup per day. Why 1/5th of a loaf is a mystery that only the Germans knew the answer to. At the beginning the bread was okay and the soup had recognizable vegetables and some protein in it. As time passed the ‘bread’ became sweepings and the soup became warm water.
As a private soldier my father was obliged to work in either the coal mines or on local farms. He volunteered to be a farm worker because it allowed him access to foodstuffs not available in camp that he could trade for. The POWs were sustained by Red Cross parcels, actually boxes, many supplied from the USA through Switzerland. They were supposed to receive one parcel per week but got far fewer, and sometimes none for months. The parcels contained cans of coffee, cans containing American cigarettes, cans of butter, chocolate, candies and other highly desirable products that were rarely consumed by the POWs but used as trade goods to swap for potatoes, carrots, eggs and other staples from local farmers. It was these staples that kept them alive through the next five years.
He escaped a few times; well he walked away from the farm he was working on, but with little success. When recaptured, prisoners were yelled at, perhaps hit with a rifle butt a few times, and then they were sentenced to 21 days solitary in the camp prison, the cooler. His most successful escape attempt reached the docks at Gdansk where he and his buddy were caught climbing the dockyard fence next to a Swedish cargo ship. So he was returned to the camp and his 21 day penance before heading out on the next work party to another farm. To my father it was all an adventure to escape the monotony of camp life. His family circumstances before he volunteered was pretty rough so I don’t think POW life was too unsettling for him, early on at least. He sent a postcard home to his sweetheart, my mother to be, consisting of a photograph of his hut and its residents and telling her that he was alive (I still have it). They corresponded by letter throughout his captivity maintaining their romance from afar. There is a family story that towards the end of the war, while he was again in solitary, he was informed by the guards that his older brother was in camp looking for him. Having been captured in Tobruk in North Africa and having had many adventures before pitching up in Poland his older brother, my uncle Jim got back to Scotland the same week as my dad.
In December 1941 my father had been a POW for over a year and a half. Although the Germans had attacked the Soviet Union in June that year the POWs had little hope of an end to the war in circumstances that would see them return home victorious. Then Pearl Harbor happened and when Churchill was informed of the attack wrote that he “…went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful”. I suspect that the POWs had a similar reaction when they found out than America had entered the war on their side.
Towards the end of 1944 and beginning of 1945 the camps in Poland were emptied and the POWs were rounded up and driven west to escape the advancing Soviet forces. This little known episode is called “The March” by those who took part in it. Over a period of about four months from January to April, they were marched about back and forth across Poland and Germany for more than 500 miles in some of the most brutally cold conditions. There was very little food and those who fell out of line to raid a farmer’s field for some potatoes were often shot. Estimates vary but between 100,000 to 200,000 allied POWs took part with between 2000 and 3000 that died on the way. One morning in late April or early May 1945 my father woke in a field near Hamburg. The guards had gone and soon allied forces arrived – he was free!
My dad returned home to Scotland and soon persuaded my mother to marry him. They settled down in central Scotland and raised two boys, my elder brother and me. Although he worked pretty much every day of his life my father’s health was affected by his time as a POW. He died young, not quite 55, and a little over a year after my mom died. She was barely in her 50’s when she died having been seriously ill since her early 30’s.
So what has all this to do with a brick in our Veterans Memorial Garden? Well, I was telling a neighbor this tale a number of years back. He is a Vietnam veteran who was seriously wounded flying helicopters in the 1st Cavalry. He was interested in my Dad’s story and my experience on the bus heading to the Arizona memorial. It was he who suggested the brick. So that is why the brick is there, not just to memorialize my father but to remind folks of what the others memorialized there have done to rescue freedom, and to place my dad’s name in a country he loved and among those who saved his life and who gave me mine. But for America and Americans, my dad would not have survived and I would not have been born and would never have emigrated to the United States of America and become one of its citizens – and I would never then have placed the brick.
