My father, Jack Carter was a very private man regarding his war experiences and only once when I was about 14 did he, one night, decide to tell me about some of his memories both as a serving solider and then later when he became a POW for 5 years. I have been moved to write this short account of my father’s war years having watched the Channel 4 programme (July 2018) about the 51st Division and its defence of St Valery-en-Caux in June 1940.
His story, like so many others, is of a young man born 1916 whose best years of his life were spent under arms and in his case as a prisoner. He had come to Britain in 1937 to escape the repressive regime of Catholic Ireland where, as a Protestant, you did not have the work opportunities that should have been open to all.
He joined up in November 1939 at Isleworth Barracks Surrey and became a member of the East Surrey Regiment TA. Originally, he was in 1/6th but due to breaking his thumb in a regimental boxing match was assigned to 2/6th battalion.
He was sent to France and as a crack shot with good eyes was often used as a spotter regarding enemy aircraft. He was trained on a Bren gun carrier as a driver and told stories of learning to drive on a Sunday morning going around the Victoria Monument outside Buckingham Palace. He described his personal retreat to St. Valery with his Bren gun carrier group, carrying injured personnel and hoping for evacuation.
Evacuation never came and he was not forthcoming about the immediate days before capture. He was captured and then marched through France and finally to Holland where he was put on a barge down the Rhine, he escaped twice but was recaptured on each occasion. He ended up in Silesia where he was put to work down iron mines which he hated.
The German command insisted that you had 4 fingers and a thumb on each hand to work down the mines. His distaste for the claustrophobia of the mine was such that he got a fellow prisoner using a pick to take his left hand small finger off. The result was freedom to the surface. The war moved on and he was moved around a range of camps and took part in some of the infamous death marches, on one occasion the column were ordered to dig out a snowbound train which resulted in the loss of two toes through frost bite.
He was finally liberated by an American GI in Germany, somewhere, he never knew, but he always kept the GI’s jacket which he had been given.
My father resumed his pre-war job as a hardware salesman and lived a full life and I look back with immense pride at what he had done during those 5 years and hope that endeavour of this understated nature is recognised but equally that the world will never experience anything of this form ever again.
