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500584 Irvin Steels Army 7th Medium Regt, Royal Artillery My father Irvin Steels of 7th. Medium Regiment RA was captured in North Africa by Italians and taken to Italy via Naples. One of my father’s favourite sayings was ‘People say see Naples and die. When we were there the buggers threw bricks at us.’ They were handed over to the German Army who took them to Stalag 8B. My dad spent the rest of the war there working in the coal mines ‘where the pit props were like telegraph poles’. He joined the Army to get away from Fryston Colliery where the seam was only 2 feet thick. He left Poland on the forced March and was liberated by the Americans who had to operate on him to remove a leg which had gone gangrenous as a result of the frostbite which he suffered on the March. Needless to say my father who died in 1997 was never very forthcoming about his experiences and this is all I know of his time in captivity.
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