209005 Pte. John Shaughnessy British Army Royal Army Medical Corps from:Darlaston My father, John Shaughnessy, always known as Jack or Shon was captured at Dunkirk. He took his friend Tom to the last place in a boat as he had been shot in the face and turned back to the beach, too late to get to another boat he was captured by the Germans. He was then marched to a POW camp in Germany but escaped only to be given away at a safe house in France by a collaberateur. He was then taken to Stalag XX at Thorn. I always was told that as he was a medic he was in a camp for non-combatants with doctors and padres and other medics. One day they were being marched back from the fields, where they were made to work for the farmers, and a train had stopped below the bridge they were crossing. The guards had thrown an old Jewish man out to die on the side of the tracks. My father, being a Shaughnessy and a medic, tried to get down on to the tracks to help him. The German guard saved his life by knocking him unconcious with his rifle-butt and ordering his comrades to carry him back to camp as they could see the officer at the head of the column taking out his sidearm to shoot my dad because they did not want anyone to see what was happening to the Jews who were being taken to the death-camps. He tried to escape again and broke his back falling. The Germans gave them Plaster of Paris and medical supplies and they contrived traction from two bunks and treated his broken back. Because of this my dad was repatriated via the Red Cross in early 1944. The army changed his number and he was sent over to France on D-Day plus 1 in a glider. He fought through France and went down the Suez Canal to India were he spent the last months of the war in the BMH in Calcutta. From where he was demobbed in 1946 and came home. He recovered from both the broken jaw caused by the rifle-butt and the broken back and suffered greatly with his feet because of the forced march from Dunkirk to Germany with boots that had been immersed in sea-water. In 1957, he was diagnosed with a brain-tumour and died after a short illness. All the stories I have heard have come from my mother and my uncle and I have no way of verifying them as I never heard my father mention the war. He had two small china aeroplanes, souvenirs of Thorn, which a farmer's wife gave him in exchange for some rations from his Red Cross parcel, my brother has them now. I have some photos and paper-work from Stalag XXa, including one very similar to one already on this website, with all the men dressed up for a panto or play.
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