My father, Mansel Thomas, was a Royal Marine who was part of the rearguard action during the battle for Crete in 1941. He didn't like to talk about his wartime experiences, of the battle itself or his time as a POW.
However, I do remember the little he did tell me. During the Battle of Crete my father used to credit his experiences growing up in Aberaman as having helped to save his life. He would recall the German parachutists descending from the sky and being picked off by him and his fellow Marines on the ground. However, the Germans, as is well-known by now, were better equipped with machine guns, and the loss of a key airport ensured that British forces were soon in retreat.
During the long battle my father had to traverse a good part of the island and here his childhood habits of running up and down the hills of South Wales, to deliver lunch to his father who was a pit winder in a neighboring valley, had helped give him the stamina and resilience to survive.
At the end of the battle, after the evacuation of troops had ended, my father, along with some Australian and New Zealand troops, hid in the caves along the coast until German troops discovered them. Transferred from Crete to Greece as prisoners, my father recalled being marched through Athens. Greek women would try to give the prisoners food but German guards would beat the women to discourage such altruism. Then my father and other prisoners were put on trains in cattle cars for a long trip to Germany and the Sudetenland. My father, always conscious of his bowel movements, used to say that this was the one time in his life he was grateful he was constipated, for many of the other troops crammed into his car suffered horribly from dysentery.
Throughout the remainder of the war he was a prisoner in a few camps, but the one for which I have some record is Stalag IV-C. My father used to say that a German guard saved his life. Karl (I do not have a second name) selected my father to be transferred from one camp to another. On the way to the other camp, he took my father to his home and gave him a decent meal. My father spoke German, so perhaps this helped him to develop some sort of bond with the guard? After the war, they communicated for a while, but Karl was an engineer, lived in what became East Germany, and soon ceased to correspond. My father theorized that Karl was taken further East.
During his POW life my father was fed poorly. At the end of the war he weighed less than 100lbs and he was six feet tall! Sometimes, when he felt my mother wasn't giving him a big enough portion of food (he especially liked apple pie with whipped cream, and my mother tried to monitor his health) he would reproach us, usually in a good-humored way, by saying, I starved for 4 years.
He maintained a very wary attitude towards German Shepherd dogs (Alsatians) as they were used as guard dogs in the POW camps. This was unfortunate as my husband and I love the breed. So, when we brought home our first German Shepherd, my father would send us newspaper articles featuring tales of German Shepherd dogs who had savaged people and then he would tell me how to kill one with my bare hands.
My father would also recall being tasked, along with other British troops, to go to the American troops huts to help de-louse them. He viewed the American troops as a bit soft, a result of what he regarded as their relatively pampered upbringings. In South Wales, his family's house did not have running hot water, nor did they have an interior bathroom. So, my father had grown up washing daily in cold water, and going outside to use the toilet. He had learned to keep himself clean in relatively austere conditions.
There were some incidents of levity, however, cockroaches were caught and raced, tricks were played on German guards, and my father remembered one German asking him why British troops would so frequently use the F*** word.
At the end of the war, as the Russians approached, many of the German guards panicked and deserted. The prisoners took control of the camp. Some German guards, those who had been harsh and particularly cruel to the prisoners, were tied up and left for the Russians. But other German guards, who had been fair or decent, were instructed to put on POW Allied uniforms and join some POWs who commandeered a truck to escape to the Allied lines. My father recalled passing bloated SS bodies along the sides of roads casualties of the Russian advance before his truck reached the American frontline. He particularly remembered his first impression of the American camp some GIs were playing guitars and harmonizing.
