Lance Corporal James (Jimmy) Hunter

From: Martin Hunter

Date: 9 February 2012
Subject: Lance Corporal James ‘Jimmy’ Hunter, RASC, POW at Stalag VIIIB

My name is Martin Hunter & my late Grandfather, Jimmy Hunter was captured in Incheville, near Treport, France in June 1940, fighting with the 51st Highland Division, and was transported to Stalag VIIIB at Lamsdorf. He didn’t really say much about his time in the camps & Grandma wouldn’t let us ask him questions about it as it upset him, deeply.
The only information I could glean from him was:

He was in the choir for a Concert Party in the camp that performed plays like The Mikado, and they performed at The Berlin Opera House for some high ranking German officers and their wives, as well as a ‘Holiday Camp’ for POWs who agreed to work for the German war effort. They were allowed to walk around Berlin accompanied by a German guard.

He was good friends with a certain ‘Sergeant Brown’ who was a sort of important Quartermaster who travelled with Grandad’s concert party.

He was diagnosed with pneumonia one winter and was transported by horse drawn sledge to a hospital 2 or 3 days travel away where they used to be ‘de-loused’ (it sounded like Gliwice). He was in hospital for several months and considered for repatriation to England through the Red Cross.

Next to the camp there was a plant where they made gas from coal. Grandad used to work on the plant sometimes, not tightening up fittings and causing damage by fitting the wrong couplings and parts. Grandad said finally when the plant started to produce gas, the RAF bombed the plant, and the Germans gave up trying to get it to work. But he couldn’t understand why they never bombed it earlier, or how they knew that it had finally started to be productive.

He was involved in boxing in the camp, losing his first fight but undefeated afterwards. He also played football for the ‘England’ football team.

He also said that during an air raid one night, a crew member from a shot down RAF bomber came down by parachute within the camp undetected by the camp guards. Grandad seemed to think he was Australian, Canadian or from New Zealand, quite small and slightly built. The concert party were due to travel around Germany, and they decided to smuggle this aircrewman in the false bottom of a trunk used to store the concert party’s costumes, with my grandad and his best friend Stan Cowan from the Isle of Man taking turns in the bottom of the trunk to give the ‘escapee’ a break from the trunk’s confines.

He met an English lady, called Marjorie Booth [an internet search for Marjorie Booth Lamsdorf returns some very interesting material], who’d married a German officer before the war. This officer was something to do with running the Camp. She was interested in opera and used her connections to get sheet music, instruments and scripts for plays and concerts for the concert party to perform. He remembers her because she was from Leyland, Lancashire near where my Grandad lived.

He took part in the march westwards, finally being liberated by the American Army in Southern Germany, where Grandad used to say he never took his boots off for 6 months.

My Grandad was my hero, and I wish I’d recorded the snippets of memory that my Grandad spoke, but sometimes even mentioning the War brought tears to his eyes. He had 2 children, 3 grandchildren & 6 great grandchildren & was married to Grandma for 70 years, Grandma died 3 weeks before their 71st wedding anniversary & Grandad joined her 3 months later aged 92.