Maurice Jennings

I left school at 14 and started work in the grocery department of Market Harborough Co-op, the Lutterworth branch, until I was twenty.

After the war broke out in September, I was called up for the second intake on January 18th. 1940. I had to report to the Gibraltar Barracks in Leeds and the next day we were brought back to Leicester. We were billeted in Thomson’s Factory on Eastern Boulevard. I was there until we were sent to France with the British Expeditionary Force in April 1940.

Of course, the war was on, and we went to a place called L’Armitage near Rennes in Brittany. Then, of course, we got sent up to the Front. We were split into companies, then into platoons and then split up into sections. There were nine men in my section.

Our section was on La Bassee canal. It was utter chaos at times. Often, we lost communication with the rest of the platoon. We were being fired at by the Germans and we lost the Corporal and the Lance Corporal. There were seven of us Privates left. I went off on my own to try and contact somebody. The upshot was that I got shot and wounded in my left hand and I was captured as a prisoner of war for five years. I ended up down a coal mine for two and a half years.

We were in Belgium for five days and four nights in open fields without anything to eat or drink and without any medical attention. I was afraid I might lose my hand. Fortunately, gangrene didn’t set in. I palled up with a fella from Manchester. He had been wounded in the head.
There were some trucks on the road that ran by the field, and he gave me a nudge to try and jump on a truck when the time came to move out. We succeeded, so we didn’t have to march. These trucks took us to a train station.

There were some Sisters of Mercy there who attended to my hand and gave us something to eat and drink. The German wounded had also been taken to the station and were loaded onto separate carriages from the POWs. We were transported into Germany to a place called Nurnberg.

After a few days we were taken to a new POW camp, Stalag IVB. I was one of only six English men in a camp of about 30.000 French and Belgians. The camp was still being built and we were sleeping on straw under canvas.

After a while, some senior German officers came in and kicked up a bit of a fuss when they found us six English men and we were moved to another compound. Eventually, we were moved to our own English camp; Stalag VIIIB at Lamsdorf.

Everybody below the rank of Sergeant was sent out to work and I ended up working down a coal mine for two and a half years. Come 1943, I had an illness called nephritis. (a kidney complaint) I was taken back to Stalag VIIIB and put in the camp hospital with our own doctors and nurses from the Royal Army Medical Corps who had been captured. I think I was treated by a Doctor Spencer.

Anyhow, I got better, and I was sent off to work in a stone quarry for 10 months. Then I got off that and was sent back to VIIIB. By this time, it was 1944 and D-Day had started, and the Russians were advancing from the East and all the German civilian population were being called up.

The labour shortage affected us and about twenty-eight of us ended up in a working party, based in Hindenburg, Upper Silesia, near the Polish border. We laboured at the railway station — carrying goods to the town, for example, flour and sugar to the local mills and bake houses. The sacks were made of hessian and weighed two and a half hundred weight, carried on our backs.

On January 23rd. 1945 we were moved out on a march. On that first day we had to march about 50 miles to cross the River Oder before the bridges were blown up to prevent the Russian advance. I had a notebook with me and recorded the names of all the villages we passed through. We were on the march until Tuesday April 23rd. and then we refused to go any further. We’d had new guards assigned to us the week before and they had treated us more kindly than the previous lot. It was a bit crafty really, because they and we knew the Yanks were getting closer and some of the lads had talked about getting our own back on the guards.

Some of our party had gone out to make contact with the Yanks and let them know we were in the village. We were liberated at 6 o’clock in the evening. There were three Sherman tanks and some jeeps. I will always remember it. I can’t put into words how I felt.

Some of our party went …well…berserk, but me and a few mates took ourselves off quietly and broke into a clothes shop where we kitted ourselves out in some clean underwear, the first change since January.

Shortly afterwards we were taken to an airfield and Dakota planes transported us out in groups of twenty-five to France. Whilst waiting for my transport back to England I wrote to my mother in an unsteady hand because I was so excited at once again being a free man.

I believe I’m only here today because of the Red Cross parcels that we received during those five years. You didn’t get your own parcel; we shared out what there was and used some of the stuff to barter for bread from the locals.

Maurice Jennings.

From the BBC’s WW2 People’s War, an online archive of wartime memories contributed by members of the public and gathered by the BBC. The archive can be found at bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar