A couple of months ago I was randomly served a Facebook post about the Airspeed Horsa glider. The Horsa was a cheap, single use glider used to deliver troops to Normandy on the 6th and 7th of June: D-Day and beyond. The mission was land behind the defending German troops and support the frontal assault from the Channel. It was called Operation Mallard
I remembered that the family oral history held that my uncle Jack (actually Henry John) Simmons had flown on one. I determined to find out a bit more. The first port of call was a UK.gov website run by the Ministry of Defence. They will search for the records of service personnel and either produce them or refer the applicant to the National Archives at Kew. But there was a small hurdle. They’ll only do that in the case of a documented deceased person. That meant I needed Jack’s death certificate. It wasn’t a real problem, I knew enough about him to order it from the Government Records Office but it would take about a week to arrive.
In the meantime, I remembered that Jack’s younger brother Bill (William George) had also served in the war but I knew even less about his service than Jack’s. He was thought to have been a prisoner of war, possibly in the far East but that was about it. I also remembered that I’d obtained Bill’s death certificate a while ago for a completely different purpose. I had the website address and a scan of the certificate so I made the request. The replay came back surprisingly quickly. They didn’t have his records; they’d been transferred to the National Archives, but here is some advice on how to request them.
So I did. In the mean time, Jack’s DC had arrived so I made the request to the MoD. And again I had to make a second request to Kew.
It took about five or six weeks but yesterday I was emailed a link to scans of some of of Bill’s paperwork. It was scrappy and faded and needed quite a bit of deciphering, but it told me quite a lot. And armed with what I saw I was able to make better searches of archives at Family History sites and what I put together was this.
To put Bill in context slightly, he was the second son of my maternal grandmother, Rhoda Jane Simmons. (née BAILEY) by her first husband, Henry G. Simmons. He was born on the 21st August 1918 in East London.
What follows is informed partly by the various documents I was sent by the National Archives and partly by the historical record. Bills service record puts him in certain places at certain times and the known history of the war enables me to fill in the gaps to a high degree of confidence.
In May 1939, with the possibility of war on the horizon the government passed the Military Training Act. All men of 20 or 21 years of age were required to register for service and most would undergo six months of training. After that they would return to civilian life but be regarded as Militiamen and were liable for recall for the next four years . Bill dutifully did that and on 18th July 1939 he was enlisted as Gunner William George Simmons, 1509475, and assigned to 112 Battery, 19th Searchlight Mobile Depot, part of the Royal Artillery, for training.
On the first of September, of course, Germany invaded Poland and two days later war was declared. All militiamen were immediately transferred to the regular army. At the end of the year, Bill was posted to “8th Searchlight Battery, 2nd Searchlight Regiment, Royal Artillery.” He deployed to France as part of the British Expeditionary Force on the first of January.
I don’t at the moment have any detailed records of the movements of his unit for the next few months but by the 20th May it had ended up at Frévent in northern France. By this time, the German Fall Gelb offensive had occupied most of the area and the BEF was falling back to Dunkirk. Bill’s unit was either cut off or overrun and was captured. He was reported as a prisoner of war on the 20th.
From there he had a long journey across Europe. He would have been taken first to a local collection point in a barn or field, then probably marched through two or more consolidation camps ending perhaps in a facility near Lille or Valenciennes. The marches were hard with little food and water and quite a few prisoners didn’t survive.
The next step was a rail transfer to a Dulag or transit camp. Given where we know Bill ended up, it was likely to be near Königsberg or perhaps Stettin. That was where they would have been formally processed, given medical checkups and issued a prisoner number. (Bill was 7113)
This would take about a week, after which prisoners were put, again, on trains probably in cattle trucks and transported to occupied Poland. Bill’s destination was Stalag XXA in Toruń. It would have taken three to five days. He probably arrived in early June.
And there he remained for the best part of five years. As far as I’ve been able to determine, conditions were on the poor side of austere. Food was minimal, at least to begin with, although occasionally supplemented with Red Cross parcels. Dramas, such as The Great Escape rather romanticised prison life. It wasn’t much like that. As enlisted men, rather than officers, Bill and the others were required to work. Agricultural labour was common, or railway maintenance, or forestry.
On the other hand, at least they weren’t Russians. Apparently, conditions for Russian prisoners were much worse.
Four and a half years passed.
In January 1945 the writing was on the wall for Germany. The Allies were moving slowly but inexorably eastwards and the Russians were also steadily advancing from the east. A decision was made to abandon the POW camps in Poland. On or around 20th and 21st January the Allied prisoners were marched out in groups of a couple of hundred. The sick and injured were left behind in camp hospitals as were the Russians. Ten days later, Russian forces reached the camp, but most of the British were gone. They were walking across Poland towards Germany in the depths of a Polish winter
If their journey to the camp had been hard, the march west was far, far worse. There was little food and water and they were frequently reduced to scavenging. They slept either in barns or abandoned buildings or in fields and ditches and many froze to death in their sleep. Wikipedia has an overview article on The March. You need a strong stomach. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_March_(1945)
I don’t know exactly what route Bill followed, or what particular privations he personally suffered. What I do know is that the next entry in the summary of his service is that he was “Freed by Allied Forces on the European Western Front,” but no date is given. The date column actually reads “D.N.K.” “Do not know.”
The historical record shows that the majority of prisoners on the march were heading for Stalag II-B or Stalag 357 near Bad Fallingbostel in Lower Saxony. Those camps were liberated by units of the British Army on 16th April. It seems likely that if Bill had reached there, that would be the date of his liberation. So my default assumption would be that he was one of the many who were simply picked up by Allied forces on the road as they advanced. But whenever and however it was, he was now back with the British.
The next entry shows that he was repatriated, probably by Operation Exodus on 11th May. Exodus was a huge airlift carried out in the spring and early summer of 1945 to bring freed POWs home. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Exodus_(WWII_operation)
I don’t know what happened to him or what he did once he got home for the next year or so. All I do know is that he was discharged from the army for medical reasons on 25th May 1946. The grounds given were “Flat feet and mild anxiety state.” Conditions that were perfectly understandable for someone who’d been doing heavy labour for four years and marched the best part of a thousand miles through snow.
His discharge notes say that his military conduct had been exemplary. Furthermore he was an “Honest, sober, reliable and trustworthy man, who has rendered very satisfactory service during his time with the colours. Willing, loyal and hardworking” He was awarded the War Medal.
After the war he had, I think, a fairly normal life. He became a quantity surveyor. He married twice, the first time in 1956 to a June Bailey, who was actually his first cousin through his mother’s parents. I don’t know how long that marriage lasted but I don’t recall ever meeting her. Rather late in life in June 1985 he married again to Dorothy Griggs and died of lung cancer before the first year was up, in May 1986. He was living, at the time, out here in Southend.
Bill could be cantankerous and was sometimes hard to get on with. Despite his testimonial as “sober” he became quite a heavy drinker later in life and could be loud and annoyingly opinionated after a few large Bell’s. But finding all this out has slightly softened my attitude. He went through a LOT during his time in captivity and I strongly suspect that the diagnosis of “mild anxiety” that led to his discharge would nowadays be recognised as PTSD. I think he deserves a bit of latitude.
That was the life and service of my uncle Bill Simmons. In a week or so I should have enough information to cobble together a timeline of his elder brother Jack.
