The Wartime Memories Project - The Second War

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255625 William "Jock" Connell British Army Pioneer Corps from:125 Round Street, Bradford   My grandfather William Connell would not tell me about his war experiences when I asked as a child growing up in NZ but in my early twenties I went to London for several years and he came over and stayed with me and talked quite freely when I asked. He was captured at Dunkirk and had to walk to Poland, I do not know where in Poland. He ended up at Hohenfels Stalag 383 in Bavaria. He did escape but was recaptured, making it as far as Amsterdam on one occasion only to be turned in to the Germans by a civilian he contacted by mistake. He was missing a forefinger on one of his hands and he always told us the Germans shot it off but he told me he cut it in camp and he ended up with gangrene, his arm was affected and he thought he would lose it. In the end though he had only the finger amputated. Before the war he worked building tunnels in the UK, not wanting to disclose this he said he had been a barber and ended up cutting hair in the camp. At the end of the war he was on a march away from the camp further into Germany when American forces caught up with them. There were other things he told me about that I do not want to talk about here. He suffered from malnutrition as they all did.   William is 2nd from right   William is 3rd from right front row   William is 4th from right in middle row Grant Connell Add to this record.  Related Content: Pioneer Corps Battle of France and The Low Countries 1940 Operation Dynamo - The Evacuation from Dunkirk and nearby Beaches Stalag 383 Prisoner of War Camp Can you help us to add to our records? Add a record to our website. The names and stories on this website have been submitted by their relatives and friends. If your relations are not listed please add their names so that others can read about them Did you or your relatives live through the Second World War? Do you have any photos, newspaper clippings, postcards or letters from that period? Have you researched the names on your local or war memorial? Were you or your relative evacuated? Did an air raid affect your area? If so please let us know. Help us to build a database of information on those who served both at home and abroad so that future generations may learn of their sacrifice. Contact us. Celebrate your own Family History Celebrate by honouring members of your family who served in the Secomd World War both in the forces and at home. We love to hear about the soldiers, but also remember the many who served in support roles, nurses, doctors, land army, muntions workers etc. Please use our Family History resources to find out more about your relatives. Then please send in a short article, with a photo if possible, so that they can be remembered on these pages.

The free section of the Wartime Memories Project website is run by volunteers. We have been helping people find out more about their relatives wartime experiences since 1999 by recording and preserving recollections, documents, photographs and small items. The website is paid for out of our own pockets, library subscriptions and from donations made by visitors. The popularity of the site means that it is far exceeding available resources and we currently have a huge backlog of submissions. If you are enjoying the site, please consider making a donation, however small to help with the costs of keeping the site running. Hosted by: The Wartime Memories Project Website is archived for preservation by the British Library Copyright MCMXCIX - MMXXIV - All Rights Reserved We do not permit the use of any content from this website for the training of LLMs or for use in Generative AI, it also may not be scraped for the purpose of creating other websites.