Dixie on the march

Dixie on the march

Dixie Deans speech

James ‘Dixie’ Deans was captain of a Whitley bomber when after twenty five operations he was shot down on the 10th of September 1940 and became a prisoner of war. He was imprisoned initially at Stalag Luft 1 where he became Camp Leader. He then moved to Stalag Luft 3 and then Stalag Luft 6 before embarking on the Long March negotiating with the German forces regarding the distribution of Red Cross parcels and with the British advancing forces.

01:00:27 audio recording

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ADeansJAG[Date]-010002

Mr Chairman and gentlemen, I feel very honoured to be invited as your guest at your Club and when one considers the history of the Club I’m sure I reflect the feeling of all the guests when I say thank you, we are all honoured and flattered at your invitation.
[recording paused]
Before telling you about my experiences in Germany I think I’d better explain very briefly what my position was before. I was a direct entry sergeant pilot, the captain of a Whitley night bomber. I had completed twenty five operations including two to Italy and two to Berlin before I was shot down on the 10th of September 1940. This was on a raid on Berlin and after I had dropped my bombs I was hit by flak over Berlin itself but I managed to get my aircraft back as far as the German Dutch frontier. I parachuted and was later captured in Holland and taken to the transit camp for Air Force prisoners which was called Dulag Luft and was near Frankfurt on Main. After about ten days there I was moved to the first main POW camp for RAF prisoners which was Stalag Luft 1 in Barth at the western end of the Baltic Sea. I became the camp leader and the Man of Confidence of all the NCO’s compound of four hundred men at Stalag Luft 1. Then in April 1942 we were moved from Luft 1 to Stalag Luft 3 at Sagan in Silesia. Here the total number of men quickly increased from the four hundred it started with to nearly two thousand five hundred. Then in June 1943 we once again had to move again to a bigger camp at Stalag Luft 6 which was called Heydekrug. This was situated in Lithuania or Memenland as it used to be called right on the eastern end of the Baltic. We again had to move in August ’44 and we moved first of all to a place, Toruń in Poland but we only stayed there for two weeks before going on to Fallingbostel in Hanover. New arrivals had to be interrogated and coded information was sent back to London. Groups of code workers had to be formed to facilitate sending lengthy messages and also for security reasons. Sometimes escape aids and equipment were sent to us and hidden in parcels containing otherwise harmless looking goodies. The German Abwehr or security troops often searched the entire camp to find escape radio and other contraband equipment. The Gestapo occasionally carried out this function and on these occasions the German authorities were more afraid than we were that some of our gear would be found. Sometimes we were forewarned that the Gestapo were about to search and on one occasion the POWs managed to confiscate some useful items from the Gestapo. In Stalag Luft 6 in Heydekrug the Russian artillery was booming loud before the Germans decided to evacuate the camp. We then moved to Toruń in Poland where we joined with a group of Army POWs and after a few weeks we moved west to a large camp called Stalag 357 at Fallingbostel near Hanover. In April 1945 the British Army was thundering to the west when we left the camp at gunpoint and were marched over Luneburg Heath to Lauenberg where we crossed the River Elbe. I learned that the International Red Cross had moved part of their headquarters and parcel stores from Switzerland to Lübeck. The commandant agreed to take me to Lübeck where I saw the Red Cross parcel representative and arranged for a consignment of food parcels to be delivered by truck to Gresse. Gresse is a village to the northeast of Lauenberg and it was my intention to direct our columns of troops through Gresse where they would be able to pick up some Red Cross food. Unfortunately, a squadron of Typhoons bombed one of the columns of POWs as the men were trying to pack the Red Cross food into their haversacks. The anti-personnel bombs killed thirty men and injured more. The only doubtful consolation was that there was an equal number of German casualties. The German commandant always insisted he was acting under orders from the German divisional commander but eventually I persuaded him to stop when we were at Lake Schaalsee which is south of Lübeck. I convinced him that if we continued in the direction we were heading we would walk into the advancing Russians. I insisted that the Russians were our allies and it did not matter to us who released us but would he want to be taken by the Russians? He agreed to let me try to get through the lines to the advancing British with a view to stopping the bombing of the POWs and also to try and get some help for the men who had become sick while on the march. There were over two hundred of them. He even borrowed a fresh bike for me. He lent me his personal interpreter, an inter officier in case we met some Germans who were doubtful of my intentions. He also gave me a signed note explaining my mission and tried to tell me which bridge I should head for to cross the Elbe-Trave Canal. But his information was not up to date and I found that the bridge over the canal was already demolished and the town of Büchen itself was bombarded by mortar shells as soon as we arrived there. We had to scramble into a bunker for shelter and no one seemed to notice the men in RAF uniform. We found our cycles amongst all the rubble and headed south along the east bank of the canal. Frequently we had to fall off our bikes into a ditch for shelter when bursts of mortar or shells came whistling over. When we came to a village which the Germans said was the front-line hospital I was invited to have supper with the German medical officers. I was told that the GHQ was in a village farther on and that I could only go there if I were blindfolded. As it was getting dark I decided not to try to get across and make contact with the British until the morning. So I sent the [inter-officier Mombach] to the German headquarters to get approval and instructions so that we could go first thing in the morning. I had barely finished supper when [Mombach] came back to tell me that the headquarter had been taken by the advancing British. We had a few drinks with the German doctors before settling down to sleep in the small room in the hospital that the German doctors had put at my disposal. I was very tired but did not sleep for long before being rudely awakened by some rough tough paratroops who wanted to know who I was and where the hell I got the RAF uniform I was wearing. I was soon passed up the line of command and taken back to Lauenberg where the divisional commander and General Barker was due that morning and where I waited in the Officer’s Mess for the arrival of the general. I had a sketch map of the area which I showed the general. This was the area around Schaalsee and it indicated the number of POWs in the farms and villages. He was quick to see the danger as the RAF were about to bomb Gudow where the German Divisional Command was located but there were also about two thousand POWs in or near the town. So the raid was promptly called off. I was surprised to learn that General Barker knew that the German general was in Gudow and that he also knew the name of the German general. This was all information that I was about to pass on to him. He took note of my complaint about the bombing of POWs and said that this should not have happened as he knew there were a large number of POWs in the area and the RAF had been warned to be very careful before bombing troops on the roads. He said he would arrange for ambulances to come and pick up the sick provided the Germans would guarantee free passage for this purpose. The only person that could give this guarantee was the German general so I proposed to get the POW camp commandant Oberst Ostmann to take me over to Gudow for this purpose. General Barker was not keen that I should risk going back as he felt it would only be a matter of days before his troops got through to us and he offered to have me flown back to England. However, as my mission was only half done he agreed. In the meantime, my bike had disappeared and my German [inter-officier] had been thrown into the prisoner cage. The German [Mombach] was released at my insistence to accompany me and I was given a confiscated German Mercedes to get me back but I insisted on having a Red Cross flag from the medical to drape over the car bonnet. The return journey was uneventful though I called at a few of the villages where our POWs were situated and relayed General Barker’s instructions for evacuation as soon as we were reached by the advancing British troops. Oberst Ostmann was not prepared to risk going to see his general at Gudow in daylight and arranged to set off at daybreak the following morning. His Opel car wouldn’t start so I, his prisoner had to give him a lift in my Mercedes. The German general would not agree so I decided to set off for Lauenberg where I was to see General Barker to let him know the German general’s decision about the ambulances. I took with me a young Army lieutenant who had been captured while we were on the march as I thought he would be able to recognise and know where to look for guns if anyone should want to stop us. This turned out to be a wise precaution as it was he who spotted the muzzle of a tank gun pointing at us through some trees as we rounded a bend in the road. I stopped the car smartly and got out and waved my white, off-white handkerchief at the tank as it approached us. The officer in the tank said he had been watching us through field glasses and luckily he had recognised me having met me in the Officer’s Mess at Lauenberg the day before. He was on reconnaissance and was moving on as far as he could without meeting resistance and when he did so he would call up reinforcements. I stopped to show him where there were some German troops before carrying on. I was soon caught up in a tremendous traffic jam of refugees with anything on wheels carrying all they had and heading for the River Elbe which they were hoping to cross at Lauenberg. In the midst of this shambles I spotted a jeep trying to thread its way through in the opposite direction. The driver was a Colonel [Padre.] He spotted me and said, ‘Is your name Deans? I’m looking for you. I have instructions from General Barker to assist in getting your POWs back to Lauenberg where field kitchens have been set up. They will get a meal there before being transported back to Lüneburg where the German military barracks had been taken over for use as a transit camp for POWs.’ Events had overtaken me and there was no point in trying to get through to meet General Barker so I went back with the Padre Colonel [Wells] and assisted him in clearing up all the POWs from the Schaalsee area, giving them final instructions and seeing them on their way to Lauenberg. Finally I joined the trek over the Bailey bridge which the British Army had erected over the River Elbe at Lauenberg.
[pause - pages turning]
Mr Chairman and gentleman, I feel very honoured to be invited as a guest at your Club today and when one considers the history of the Club I feel sure that I reflect the feelings of all your guests when I say we are flattered by your invitation and thank you.
[pause - pages turning]
Mr Chairman, gentleman, I shall try to describe some of the details of my experiences in Germany as a POW and I hope I do not bore you with certain aspects of life in Germany that don’t particularly interest you. On the other hand I hope I don’t omit some of the things that you want to hear about. To start with I was a sergeant pilot. The captain of a Whitley night bomber. I had completed twenty five operations over enemy territory before I was shot down on the 10th of September 1940 on a raid over Berlin. I was captured in Holland and taken straight away to Dulag Luft near Frankfurt on Main. This was the transit camp for all Air Force prisoners and here I was interrogated. I stayed here for about two weeks before being transferred to the main Air Force camp which was Stalag Luft 1 at Barth in Pomerania. There were between three and four hundred men in the non-commissioned officer’s compound and I was selected the camp leader and Man of Confidence during 1941. This meant that I had to deal with the Germans, the protecting power, the Red Cross and the YMCA and organise life in general in the camp which meant I had to deal with discipline and security as well as organise the education, debating, sporting and other recreational activities. We also organised an Escape Committee and a committee to deal with the distribution of Red Cross food parcels. We had some very clever craftsmen in our midst and two of them had worked together building a radio and by this means we were able to receive the BBC news regularly from then right through the war. Frequent searches of the camp were made by the German Abwehr or security troops. They were mainly looking for any escape equipment, radio equipment or anything of a contraband nature. Occasionally we also had searches by the Gestapo. This was less frequent and on occasions we even had forewarning of these searches. This I think was because the Germans feared that the Gestapo should find some contraband equipment which they hadn’t been able to find and it would have meant that they would have been in more trouble than we. At the beginning I used to interview all new arrivals in the camp. This was very good practice and apart from general information one occasionally received information which was useful to the Escape Committee and even some that was worth coding and sending back home. We had several men who were registered code workers. A few were registered before they were taken prisoner but the numbers were later increased so that we were able to form two or three teams which worked independently for security reasons and also when a lengthy message had to be transmitted. The practice of interviewing all new prisoners I had to delegate fairly soon afterwards as the camps increased in size. In April 1942 the whole camp was moved from Barth in Pomerania to Sagan in Silesia. This was Stalag Luft 3 and in a short space of time, only a matter of several weeks I found that the men in my charge increased from three to four hundred to two thousand five hundred. We only stayed at Stalag Luft 3 from April 1942 to June 1943 when the whole of the NCO’s compound was moved to a new camp. Stalag Luft 6 at Heydekrug in Lithuania. In this camp the numbers increased fairly rapidly to eight thousand. We stayed at Heydekrug from June 1943 until August 1944 by which time the Russian troops were advancing from the east and they were getting so close that one could hear the heavy artillery booming in the near distance. Eventually the Germans decided that the camp would have to be evacuated. It was split up into two sections one of which moved west to a brand new camp for Air Force prisoners but my own section with about four thousand men were moved down to Toruń in Poland where we became part of a larger Army camp. We only stayed there for about three weeks during which time again the Russian artillery became uncomfortably close and sounded ominous and again we had to move with some haste out of the camp. But this time we moved west right across Germany to a camp called 357 at Fallingbostel near Hanover. On each occasion these moves were carried out in cattle trucks. We only stayed at Fallingbostel Stalag 357 for about seven months. That was from August 1944 until the end of March or early April in 1945 but this was a miserable period. The Germans were less and less able to feed us and the supply of Red Cross parcels had ceased due to the Allied bombing of everything on the rail and road. Many of the men were getting into bad shape with malnutrition and the commandant eventually agreed to take me in a truck to Lübeck where the Red Cross had set up a subsidiary parcel distribution store. They had literally millions of parcels in a large warehouse there and we could have taken as many as we liked but transport was a problem and it was left to me to do some negotiation with the German transport authorities. After quite a bit of haggling I managed to talk the German authorities into attaching three wagons of parcels on to the end of a passenger train which was going down to Fallingbostel. This was a very useful stop gap until the Red Cross was able to arrange for five tonne lorries driven by volunteer Army and POWs to distribute the parcels to the camps.
[tape interrupted]
— doubted my intentions. He also gave me a signed note explaining my mission and he tried to tell me which bridge I should head for to cross the Elbe Trave Canal. But his information was not up to date and I found that the bridge over the canal was already demolished and the town of Büchen itself was bombarded by mortar shells as soon as we arrived there. We had to scramble into a bunker for shelter and although the bunker was full of German civilians and soldiers no one seemed to notice the men in RAF uniform. When the shelling subsided we found our cycles and headed south along the east bank of the canal and frequently we had to fall off our bikes into a ditch for shelter when bursts of mortar or shells came whistling over. When we came to a village which the Germans said was the front-line hospital I was invited to have supper with the German medical officers. I was told that the GHQ was in a village further on and that I could only go there if I were blindfolded. As it was by now getting dark I decided not to try to get across and make contact until morning.
[tape paused]
As it was by now getting dark I decided not to try to get across and make contact until morning so I sent the [inter-officier Mombach] to the German GHQ to get approval and instructions so that we could go first thing in the morning. I had barely finished supper when [Mombach] came back to tell me that the headquarters had to be taken by the advancing British. We had a few drinks with the German doctors before settling down to sleep in a small room in the hospital that the German doctors had put at my disposal. I was very tired but didn’t sleep for long before being rudely awakened by some rough tough paratroops who wanted to know who I was and where I’d got the RAF uniform I was wearing. I was soon passed along up the line of command and was taken back to Lauenberg where the divisional General Barker was due that morning and there I waited in the Officer’s Mess for the arrival of the general. I showed General Barker a sketch map of the area around Schaalsee which indicated the number of POWs in the farms and villages. He was quick to see the danger as the RAF was about to bomb Gudow where the German Divisional Command was located but there were also about two thousand POWs in or near the town so the raid was called off. I was surprised to learn that General Barker knew precisely where the German general was in Gudow and that he also knew the name of the German general. This was all information that I was about to pass on to him. He took a note of my complaint about the bombing of POWs and said that this should not have happened as he knew that there were a large number of POWs in the area and the RAF had been warned to be very careful before bombing troops on the roads. He said he would arrange for ambulances to come and pick up the sick provided the Germans would guarantee free passage for this purpose. The only person who could give this guarantee was the German divisional general himself so I proposed to get the POW camp commandant Oberst Ostmann to take me over to Gudow for this purpose. General Barker was not keen that I should risk going back as he felt it would only be a matter of days before his troops got through to us and he offered to have me flown back to England. However, as my mission was only half done he agreed. In the meantime my bike had disappeared and my German [inter-officier] had been thrown into the prisoner cage. The German [Mombach] was released to accompany me and I was given a confiscated German Mercedes to get me back but I insisted on having a Red Cross flag from the medical to drape over the car bonnet. On the return journey I called at a few of the villages where POWs were situated and relayed General Barker’s instructions for evacuation as soon as we were when the advancing British reached us. Oberst Ostmann was not prepared to risk going to see his general at Gudow in daylight and arranged to set off at daybreak the following morning. Unfortunately, his Opel car wouldn’t start and I, his prisoner had to give him a lift in my Mercedes. The German general would not agree so I decided to set off for Lauenberg where I was to see General Barker to let him know the German general’s decision about the ambulances. I took with me a young Army lieutenant who had been captured while we were on the march as I thought he would be able to recognise and know where to look for guns if anyone should want to stop us. This was a fortunate precaution as it was he who spotted the nozzle of a tank gun pointing at us through some trees as we rounded a bend in the road. I stopped the car smartly and got out and waved my off-white handkerchief at the tank as it approached us. The officer in the tank said he had been watching us through field glasses and luckily he had recognised me having met me in the Officer’s Mess at Lauenberg the day before. He was on reconnaissance and was moving on as far as he could without meeting resistance and when he did he would call up for reinforcements. I stopped to show him where there were some German troops before carrying on. I was soon caught up in a tremendous traffic jam of refugees with anything on wheels carrying all they had and heading for the River Elbe which they were obviously hoping to cross at Lauenberg. In the midst of this shambles I spotted a jeep trying to thread its way through in the opposite direction. The driver was a Colonel [Padre.] When he spotted me he stood up and said, ‘Is your name Deans? I’m looking for you and I have instructions from General Barker to assist in getting your POWs back to Lauenberg.’ He confirmed the details General Barker had already given to me. Namely that we should go in small parties as far as Lauenberg and at Lauenberg field kitchens would be set up where we would get a meal before being transported back to Lüneburg where the German military barracks had been taken over for use as a transit camp for POWs.’ Events had overtaken me and there was no point in trying to get through to meet General Barker again so I went back with the [Padre] Colonel [Wells] and assisted him in clearing up all the POWs from the Schaalsee area, giving them final instructions and seeing them on their way to Lauenberg. Finally I joined the trek over the Bailey bridge which the British Army had erected over the River Elbe at [Hamburg.] Normally while we were in receipt of Red Cross food parcels we could manage alright. There were two particular occasions when things were very very difficult. The first of these was after I was shot down and until the early summer —
[tape interrupted]
1941 when there were literally no Red Cross parcels. This was due to the collapse of the Red Cross organisation in Switzerland due to the tremendous strain put on the organisation as a result of Dunkirk. The second was in the winter of 1944/45 when the Allied Air Forces were bombing the railways incessantly and the roads and indeed nothing could be transported. This naturally affected the International Red Cross as well as the Germans and so eventually they had to recognise that the distribution of the parcels to the camps in Germany was impossible from the Distribution Centre in Switzerland and so a subsidiary distribution point was set up at Lübeck on the western end of the Baltic.
[tape paused]
Mr chairman, gentlemen to begin with I shall give you a very rough outline of my background in the Air Force and as a POW. I was a sergeant pilot in the Air Force and was the captain of a Whitley bomber and I had completed twenty five ops including two to Italy and two to Berlin before I was shot down on the 10th of September 1940. This was on my second raid on Berlin. I was hit by heavy flak over Berlin itself but managed to right my aircraft and struggled back as far as the German/Dutch frontier but here I had to abandon aircraft and after all the other members of the crew had safely got out I parachuted and was eventually captured in Holland. I was taken to Dulag Luft, the transit camp for Air Force prisoners. There we were interrogated and after about two weeks I was transferred to Stalag Luft 1, the main camp for Royal Air Force prisoners. Stalag Luft 1 was situated near a town called Barth in Pomerania near the western end of the Baltic Sea. At this camp I was elected to be the camp leader and Man of Confidence of the NCO’s compound. This meant that I had to take command of between three and four hundred non-commissioned officers. I soon found that I was involved in maintaining discipline within the camp, interviewing all new prisoners a practice which I later had to delegate because of the large number of prisoners coming in. And from these interviews one gained all sorts of information which was in the first case of use to those people who were interested in escape and also we gleaned a fair amount of information which was useful to the authorities in London and this had to be coded and sent off through one of our code workers. A few people were registered as code workers before they were shot down and we registered several more while we were in POW camps and indeed eventually we had to organise two or three groups of code workers which worked independently but under control for security reasons and also when a long message had to be sent this was necessary. Messages were received from London in coded letters and also on the radio on a particular wavelength. We had a radio which one of our experts had built out of scraps and from materials which he had bartered from the Germans. But the [unclear] of this radio had to be rewound in order to receive the particular messages we, I think asked to listen to. Then the distribution of Red Cross parcels had to be organised as well as education, sport and other occupations. In April 1942 we had to move from Barth, Stalag Luft 1 to Stalag Luft 3 at Sagan in Silesia. This camp we stayed at from April ’42 to June 1943 and during this time the numbers increased from four hundred to two thousand five hundred. In June 1943 we were moved to another new camp. Stalag Luft 6 which was at Heydekrug. This was in Memenland District in Lithuania. This camp was very much bigger and in due course we had no less than eight thousand men. In August 1944 the Russians were advancing from the east and one could hear the guns rumbling quite close by and it sounded rather ominous before the Germans decided that we were having to evacuate the camp. Part of the camp was moved to a camp further west in Germany but this particular section that I was in was moved down to Toruń in Poland where we only stayed for about three weeks and then again went off west to a place called Fallingbostel near Hanover. We stayed at Fallingbostel which was called Stalag 357 until early April 1945. This camp was run by the German Army whereas all the previous Luft camps were run by the Luftwaffe. There were about ten thousand men in this camp and we were very very short of food at this time because the Red Cross parcels had ceased to arrive due to the bombing by the Allied forces of everything on the rail and roads. When I heard that the Red Cross had moved part of their stores and organisation from Switzerland to Lübeck I arranged with our commandant to go up to Lübeck to try and organise some parcels to come down to us. I was shattered to find, indeed I saw for myself a warehouse containing literally millions of Red Cross parcels. The Red Cross organisation was helpless and just could not find any means of getting them to the camps. I did manage to get about three truckloads attached to a passenger train which was coming to Fallingbostel and this was the only supply we had at that camp. In early April 1945 we again listened to the thundering of the heavy artillery fire this time approaching us from the west. The camp was evacuated and we had to march in a northeasterly direction over the Lüneburg Heath towards the Elbe. Then we crossed the river at the bridge at Lauenberg. During this march I had approaches from two of the senior officers who asked my permission to abscond. One was a colonel, a paymaster. He was a fairly elderly gentleman. He had always been very good to us and had treated us fairly. The other was a major. The camp officer who had come all the way from Fallingbostel with us and indeed had been with us right from arrival from Heydekrug. Again he had been very fair and reasonable and co-operative. He lived in the south of Germany and his reason for wanting to go was to get back to his family while there was still a chance to do so. I didn’t feel there was much they could do for us so I let them go. By this time the men were feeling the shortage of food and some were very very hungry and the Germans could not supply us with very much of substance. So I discussed this with the commandant and he agreed to take me to Lübeck where I saw the Red Cross representative and arranged a consignment of food parcels to be delivered by truck to a village called Gresse for the POWs to pick up as they came to that village. Unfortunately a squadron of Typhoons found one of the columns of POWs as the men were trying to pack the Red Cross food into their haversacks. This was a tragedy. The anti-personnel bombs killed thirty and injured about thirty more. The only doubtful consolation was that there was an equal number of German casualties. The German commandant insisted that he was acting under orders from the divisional commander but eventually I persuaded him to stop when we were at Lake Schaalsee just south of Lübeck. I convinced him that if we continued in the direction we were heading we would walk into the advancing Russians. The Russians I told him were our Allies and it didn’t matter to us who’d release us but questioned would he want to be taken by the Russians. He agreed to let me try to let me go through the lines to the advancing British with a view to stopping the bombing of the POWs and also to try and get some help for the men, about two hundred who had become sick while on the march. He even borrowed a fresh bike for me, lent me his personal interpreter [inter-officier] in case we met a German who doubted our intentions. He also gave me a signed note explaining my mission and tried to tell me which bridge I should head for to cross the Elbe/trave Canal. But his information was not up to date and I found that the bridge over the canal had already been demolished and the town of Büchen itself was bombarded by mortar shells as soon as we arrived there. We had to scramble into a bunker for shelter and no one seemed to notice the men in RAF uniform. After the bombs had ceased we came out and found that the building against which our cycles were leaning had been demolished apart from the one piece of wall against which our cycles were leaning. So we picked them up and carried along heading south along the east bank of the canal. We frequently had to throw ourselves and our bags into the ditches for shelter when bursts of mortar or shells came whistling over. When we came to a village which the Germans assured me was the front-line hospital I was invited to have supper with the German medical officers. I was told that the GHQ was definitely in a village further on and that I could only go there if I were blindfolded. As it was getting dark I decided not to try to get across and make contact until daylight so I sent the [inter-officier Mombach] to German GHQ in order to get approval and instructions so that we could go first thing in the morning. I had barely finished supper when [Mombach] came back to tell me that the headquarters had been taken by the advancing British. We had a few drinks with the German doctors before settling down to sleep in a small room in the hospital that the German doctors had put at my disposal. I was very tired but didn’t sleep for very long before being rudely awakened by some rough tough paratroops who wanted to know who I was and where I’d got the RAF uniform I was wearing. I was soon passed up the line of command and was taken back to Lauenberg where a divisional General Barker was due that morning and there I waited in the Officer’s Mess for the arrival of the general. I showed General Barker a sketch map of the area around Schaalsee which had been provided by the commandant and which indicated the number of POWs in the farms and villages. He was quick to see the danger as the RAF was about to bomb Gudow where the German Divisional Command was located but there were also about two thousand POWs in or near the town. So the raid was promptly called off. I was surprised to learn that General Barker knew that the German general was in Gudow and that he also knew the name of the German general [unclear] This was all information that I was about to pass on to him. He took a note of my complaint about the bombing of POWs and said that this should not have happened as he knew that there was a large number of POWs in the area and that the RAF had been warned to be very careful about bombing troops on the roads. He said he would arrange for ambulances to come and pick up the sick provided the Germans would guarantee free passage for this purpose. The only person who could give this guarantee was the German general so I proposed getting the POW camp commandant Oberst Ostmann to take me over to Gudow for this purpose. General Barker was not keen that I should risk going back as he felt it would only be a matter of days before his troops got through to us and he offered to have me flown back to England. However, as my mission was only half done he agreed. In the meantime my bike had disappeared and my German [inter-officier] had been thrown into the prison cage. The German [Mombach] was released to accompany me and I was given a confiscated German Mercedes to get me back but I insisted on having a Red Cross flag from the medical to drape over the car bonnet. The return journey was uneventful though I called at a few of the villages where our POWs were and relayed General Barker’s instructions for evacuation. Oberst Ostmann was not prepared to risk going to his general at Gudow in daylight and arranged to set off at daybreak the following morning. His Opel car would not start so I, his prisoner had to give him a lift in my Mercedes. The German general would not agree so I decided to set off for Lauenberg where I was to see General Barker to let him know the German general’s decision about the ambulances. I took with me a young Army lieutenant who had been captured while we were on the march as I thought he would be able to recognise and know where to look for guns if anyone should want to —