4 June 2021 - I finished this interesting read off this afternoon.
It tells the true story of two English soldiers, Fred Foster and Anthony Coulthard, who escaped from Stalag XXA in Nazi-occupied Poland. Their achievement was more remarkable as they didn't take the most direct route home, instead they travelled by train into Berlin, and all the way across Third Reich Germany to the Swiss border.
The Soldier Who Came Back: by Steve Foster - Amazon
How much do you know about prisoners of war(POW) during WWII, and the chaos and confusion they endured in Europe in the final months on forced marches?
This book focuses on the forced 'death' marches from POW camps during that period. Prisoners and their guards trudged often hundreds of miles on next-to-nothing rations or what they could scavenge on their way. Why? is never clearly explained then, or now. Many fell by the wayside and were either left to die or mercilessly shot.
At Gresse, a column of marching Allied POW's under guard managed to get some Red Cross parcels and was enjoying those when tragedy struck; RAF Tornadoes bore down on them creating carnage — a cruel fate for a serviceman who may have been a prisoner during the previous 4 years. The chaos and confusion of those deplorable marches need to be read to be understood more.
The Last Escape: John Nichol - Amazon
Under the Nuremberg laws of 1935, Austrian Jews were stripped of their citizenship. Anti-Semitism under the Nazis grew to a crescendo. Gustav and Fritz, father and son, are among the first to be deported to Buchenwald. From Gustav's diaries and Fritz's recollections, together with corroborative evidence drawn from a multitude of sources, Jeremy Dronfield tells the story of their long-suffering, and their ability to stay alive and stay together as much as possible, despite the overwhelming odds.
The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz: Jeremy Dronfield - Amazon
British POWs at Auschwitz ... "On the short walk to the workplace, they would pass any number of Jewish corpses, beaten to death where they had fallen. They would witness many of the beatings, but knew now the price of interference was death. Once at work, they were never out of earshot of men and women screaming. It was a constant torment in the background."
The Saboteur of Auschwitz: The Inspiring True Story of a British Soldier Held Prisoner in Auschwitz: Colin Rushton Amazon
A heroic true tale.
In 1939 Slavomir was arrested by Russians, brutally treated, and a kangaroo court saw him sentenced to 25 years' hard labour in Siberia. Escaping with some fellow inmates, they walked south, crossing Siberia, the Gobi Desert and the Himalayas.
A great true story of heroism, adventure, survival and escape.
The Long Walk Back: Slavomir Rawicz - Amazon
When you think about it, Stuka's played a huge role in the European warzone during WWII and their killing power was enormous in scale compared to the losses their squadrons suffered.
In this pilot's eye view, we're taken in acute detail through the battlefield theatres of the Blitzkrieg in France, attacks on the British retreat from Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, the bombing of Malta, escapades in North Africa and Tobruk, onto missions in Crete and, finally, the invasion of the Soviet Union.
A really engaging read with the author's own photographs of the time, to support.
Memoirs of a Stuka Pilot - Amazon
An off-beat WWII story.
When Horace Greasley (2nd/5th Leicesters) is captured in Europe, he's marched here and there as a POW, arriving at Saubsdorf POW camp in Czechoslovakia, close to the Polish border. There he falls head over heels in love with Rosa, an interpreter who hates the Nazis. He figures out how to get out of the camp, using the same route allegedly over 200 times, to spend many an hour canoodling with her. The book is not without moments of the harsh realities of poor rations, beatings and murders that go with war, but added into the mix are episodes of intimacy.
Do The Birds Still Sing in Hell? Amazon -
I wouldn't call it an obsession, but there's so much reading material on WWII that I am absorbed.
Okay, so there were these planes and they went over and bombed German targets ... stop right there, if you think that's all there was to it!
Night and day, Bomber Command in Lancasters and Halifaxes went over to Germany in their hundreds, sometimes over a thousand a time (just imagine that when you next look at the sky!), targeting German factories, transport hubs, oil depots grinding the enemy into submission. In all 55,888 Bomber Command crew lost their lives, over another 8,000 seriously wounded, the average age of 22, and not all Brits, either.
This gripping dossier brings their missions to the forefront.
Journey's End on Amazon by Kevin Wilson.
Kings Langley JMI, 1967.
Below: Mr Rolt's class of '66.
BOOK REVIEW
Erik Larson In The Garden of Beasts
On Amazon: In The Garden of Beasts
BOOK REVIEW
This is a scholarly work, meticulously bringing together many sources of information, dissecting and telling the story of Heydrich's life and times, including the dramatic assassination attempt in 1942 from which he died days later.
Second only to Himmler's terror lead in the Nazi hierarchy, the development of evil within the man Heydrich is clear. At the same time the reader is insightly rewarded, yes horrified, with some understanding of how things were and how things developed as the fascist regime became the most fearful killing machine of the 20th century.
Gerwath includes 100 pages of notes, bibliography and indexation in this book. There are many finer details to pour over and this 2011 work is surely the standard for reading about this character and his place in Germany before and during WWII.
To cap off my reading I watched 'The Man With The Iron Heart' (2017), IMDB rating 6.4, available on BBC iPlayer for the next month. The film picks off some key highlights of Heydrich's life and is watchable for its tense drama.
To compare this film to the book would be like trying to imagine what a single Harry Potter film might convey to someone who has read all the books in J K Rowling's Harry Potter saga. You simply have to read the book.
On Amazon: Hitler's Hangman, The Life of Heydrich.
During my teenage years, my mother took my brothers Michael, Graham, and me to Butlins. We visited Skegness in Lincolnshire a few times and also went to Minehead on another occasion.
Minehead was awful compared to Skeggy. The entertainments were on a much smaller scale, for one. For another, I took Graham, 7 years my junior, on the big wheel. You know how this works - a pair get off, a pair from the queue get on, the wheel turns, another pair get off, another pair get on, and so on until all the riders have been swapped over and the wheel goes around and round non-stop for a few minutes.
Well, on this occasion, the operator, probably no more than a lad in his late teens doing summer holiday work, decided for whatever reason I couldn't fathom, not to let Graham and I off. The chairs stopped in front of us, two got off, two got on, and the wheel turned, not to stop for us, but allowed the people in the chair behind us to get out. So we had an extra go.
At first, this was quite pleasing. But when that round finished, he did the same thing again. He skipped over letting us out. So around we went again. When it stopped, he again skipped over us and we had another 'extra go'. Well, let me tell you, once is fun, a second round is a treat, but a third is frightening and then a fourth makes you very ill. Needless to say, I didn't go back again to that ride.
If that was a horrible experience, the other experiences I had at Butlins sites were much more fun. From roller skating to Scalextric cars, to shows, and talent competitions to boating, and rides on the Skegness monorail, they were all great fun. You had the freedom to go anywhere on the site but you had to keep an eye on what time things were on. They even put on wrestling matches in keeping with ITV wrestling of the seventies.
Butlins left good memories, too. One of them was my brother Graham, dressed in some silly costume and wearing a beret, and he was absolutely brilliant at doing a Frank Spencer impersonation on the stage in the kids' talent show. “Mmm Betty, the cat's done a whoopsie in my beret!”
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When I was 17, in 1974, I went off to Skegness on my own, not for a holiday, but to work there for the summer. It was going to be a summer working holiday, and then I'd go back home to Hemel and start looking for a proper full-time job. You had to be 18 to work at serving on the bars, so I put down to be a pot-boy until my 18th birthday. Essentially, I had already been collecting finished drink glasses and washing them up at the Hemel Hempstead Pavilion, which allowed me to attend pop and rock concerts for free.
On the job, I was allocated to work in the Queens Showbar. The Queens was a large hall with bars along the edges and several servers. The counters for service had pumps for lager and beer, and behind the bar staff were shelves for bottles. Under the shelves were chutes, where they rolled the empties down — that's all the bottles that had been decanted into the glasses. My job, along with a few others, was to sit at the opposite end of the chutes, gather the bottles that rolled through, and place them into their designated crates. When things got slack we'd go around the tables and collect empty glasses and more empty bottles.
As part of the new intake, we were shown around the Queens Showbar by someone who was a bit of a queen himself. Can't recall his name, it may come to me, (Charlie?) but evidently he had been working there several years and knew what to do to coin it in. He dressed with glittery trailers down his back, and possibly he had a glittery halo that used to perch above his head. He talked in that gay way that can be so common nowadays, although back in the seventies people were only just starting to dare to "come out". As the head table waiter he obviously had to wait the tables, but by putting on this little gay act, he used to get really big tips.
Once a week the holidaymakers had the opportunity to book and pay extra to see a top celebrity act perform at the Queens. This turned out to be a bit of a perk for those of us working at the Queens. These special acts started at about 10pm and were supposed to finish at 12pm. This made Wednesdays special. The bars stopped serving at 11pm, as did our paid hours. But if we wanted to stay and watch the act, we were allowed to. One of the most memorable nights I've experienced was when Bob Monkhouse performed. He was clearly enjoying himself and didn't want to stop, so he continued on well into the early hours of the morning.
The interactive part of Bob's act was to ask a member of the audience to throw out a word. Then he'd use that word in a joke. Very funny. Very entertaining. In fact, I think I stayed watching him until around 1.30 or 2am. I don't know what time he actually stopped. I did hear 3am mentioned. We were meant to get up and be at work at 10am the next morning so I know I would have wanted my sleep.
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| Taking the monorail to work at Skegness |
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| A view from the monorail at Skegness |
The bar staff used to get tips, too, though as a pot-boy you were lucky if you were shown any share of that. I tried asking for bar serving work after I passed by 18th birthday, but they told me they had no vacancy at the Queen's. Someone had a word with another bar manager, for me, and I was told I could work at the Regency.
So, I moved from the Queens Showbar to the Regency bar where I started serving on the actual bar. It's the only period in my life where I've done a bit of bar-serving. I soon recognised that someone was getting far more tips than I was, and anyone else was, and maybe that's because she was a female, I thought. A bit of more careful observation and I noticed she was under-charging some customers, and the customer knew it, too. So, to keep it going, the customer(s) would tip her every time.
I hadn't been there long when I was confronted by the supervisor (never been too good with names - was it 'Linda' ?) on the bar. She wasn't a lot older than me. Truth be told I quite fancied her in her blue Butlin's coat. Anyway, she told me that money had gone missing from the bar. It had come to light during cashing up. It was a tenner, or so, short. As I was the new boy, I was under suspicion. Well, it's not me, I protested. I actually wondered if it was her, and trying to fit me up. It happened again the following week and I was accused again. It was quite a trying time. Well, all became clear to both of us the following week, when it happened again. This time the supervisor and myself had both been on our rotation day off, so we were both in the clear. Another girl on the staff subsequently got her marching orders.
The accommodation for staff was very basic, oh, much more basic than the holidaymakers had it. I was asked to share with a guy called Rob, I think he worked in the kitchens, different hours to me so we hardly saw each other.
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| Playing bowls with 'Rob' |
There were occasional staff parties, although I didn't get involved in those much, and besides, the security guards would come around looking for staff parties to bust up for making too much noise, and then confiscate the booze. To indicate how rare I went along to one of these, I can only recall one time being told by the lookout, along with everyone else, to turn off the music, lights, and hush while the guards walked around.
Saturdays were payday. We'd pick up our weekly pay in cash, then catch the bus into Skeggy. At this time I was experimenting with my drinks and decided I would have these very strong barley wines as my tipple. In reality, I don't think I touched another after I got back to Hemel. The other drink I liked was a Snakebite - lager with a frothy lemonade top.
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| 'Eve' |
While I worked at Butlins Skegness, I found myself drawn to a girl named Eve who happened to be Asian. However, I never shared contact information with any of my colleagues and have since wondered about their whereabouts.
