John Jay - Facing Fearful Odds: My Fathers Story of Captivity, Escape & Resistance 1940-1945

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To Claris, James, Josephine and Isadora
so they should know what their grandfather did in the war
that they might live

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by
PEN & SWORD MILITARY
An imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
47 Church Street
Barnsley
South Yorkshire
S70 2AS

Copyright John Jay, 2014

ISBN 978-1-47382-734-9

eISBN 9781473841413

The right of John Jay to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing.

Typeset by Concept, Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, HD4 5JL.
Printed and bound in England by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY.

Pen & Sword Books Ltd incorporates the imprints of Pen & Sword Archaeology, Atlas, Aviation, Battleground, Discovery, Family History, History, Maritime, Military, Naval, Politics, Railways, Select, Social History, Transport, True Crime, and Claymore Press, Frontline Books, Leo Cooper, Praetorian Press, Remember When, Seaforth Publishing and Wharncliffe.

For a complete list of Pen & Sword titles please contact
PEN & SWORD BOOKS LIMITED
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Website: www.pen-and-sword.co.uk

Contents

List of Plates

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Introduction & Acknowledgements

My father should have written this book. After my mother died in 2005 I discovered he had made a start. As I sifted through dusty papers in old carrier bags, I found some notes he had banged out on our ancient typewriter, summarizing the contents of twenty-five chapters. There was no title, only a few details s were typical: Time of joining, reasons and parental reaction. Then came another discovery: seven pages of narrative intended as the opening of a memoir of the Second World War experiences of Rifleman Alec Jay of 9 Platoon, C Company, 1st Battalion of the Queen Victorias Rifles, service number 6896204 and prisoner of war number 15129.

About 135,000 Britons were captured by the Germans so my fathers was not a singular experience. It did, however, have an unusual texture he was Jewish, and in the lottery of POW life this meant the odds he might die were greater than for most Kriegsgefangene or Kriegies as they called themselves.

After his capture at Calais in 1940, my father behaved as though such odds did not exist, with one exception: as an involuntary guest of the Third Reich, he hid his ethnicity. A prisoners duty was to escape so he became a serial escaper, one of the few among thousands of other ranks who sat out their captivity. Five times he escaped. Four times he was recaptured but he eluded capture the fifth time. He did not achieve a home run 1,200 or fewer than 1 per cent of POWs managed that but he did end the war a free man, fighting as a guerrilla. Had he been recaptured then, he would have faced death or concentration camp incarceration. When not on the run or in solitary confinement for his crimes, he risked being exposed as Jewish by using his schoolboy German to interpret and to bait his captors. Few Englishmen spoke German in 1940 and they were mostly Jews.

Unfortunately, he abandoned his memoir, the typescript petering out a year before shots were fired in anger. Yet as I read those seven pages, I felt my father had lost the chance to exorcize his demons, and he had left his children only fragments of the mosaic that was his wartime life.

That he enjoyed writing was clear from one fragment that sat close to his armchair a battered exercise book into which he had transcribed thirty-six poems written in captivity. This slim volume was bought towards the wars end with Lagergeld money that prisoners on Arbeitskommandos (working parties) received at a rate of 70 pfennig per day and was exchangeable for certain goods. On the front he wrote the books title, Prisoner of War Poems ; inside the front cover, for the benefit of curious guards, he wrote in German, Kriegsgelangenen Gedichte ab dem 26 Mai 1940 (War Poetry beginning from 26 May 1940). Below was a short poem in German:

Einmal macht ich Gedichte
In der fernen Friedenszeit
Eine einfache Geschichte,
Wenn alles liegt bereit.

Und als Gefangenensoldat
Ich mochte weiter schreiben.
Erinnerung und Heldentat.
Das hilft mir Zeit vertreiben.

Roughly translated it reads:

Once I wrote poems
In distant peacetime,
A simple story
When everything was clear.

And as a captive soldier
Id like to continue writing
Of memory and heroic deeds
To help me pass the time.

That the censors thought its contents innocent was evident from the official stamp, Gepruft (inspected). Buried in a haversack, it survived his final escape to sit at his side, unopened other than in moments of solitary reflection.

My original plan was to publish the poems as a volume of wartime verse. Few Second World War poems have passed into popular consciousness, in contrast to verse from the Great War as my father knew it as a child. John Pudney, a writer-turned-airman, wrote in 1941:

Do not despair
For Johnny-head-in-air;
He sleeps as sound
As Johnny underground.
Fetch out no shroud
For Johnny-in-the-cloud;
And keep your tears
For him in after years.
Better by far For
Johnny-the-bright-star,
To keep your head,
And see his children fed.

Yet writers such as W.H. Auden and Cecil Day-Lewis were poets who wrote during wartime, not war poets. Thus, todays schoolchildren study Great War poems, typically those describing the slaughter in Flanders, not Second World War poetry.

Perhaps Britains war against Adolf Hitler did not produce much memorable verse because it seemed so clearly a just war. Perhaps, it was because it was more prosaic: a technological conflict where great machines tanks, aircraft, battleships, submarines and, finally, atomic bombs drove events. Most British warriors killed at a distance, unlike the men who fought in Flanders fields between 1914 and 1918. Things were different in Russia and Hitlers Reich, but few Britons had first-hand knowledge of Stalingrad or Auschwitz. When Day-Lewis wrote Lidice, after Hitler wiped a Czech village from the map as a reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, architect of The Final Solution, he was working from media reports, not experiencing actual fighting like Owen and Sassoon.

My father saw Hitlers Reich from the inside so his verses were testimony that, I thought, deserved to survive rather than vanish into a skip in the house-clearance that followed my mothers death. I did, however, wish to set the poems in context, so I began researching his war, aiming to write an introduction. As I researched, I became enthralled, and now, after five years labour, that introduction has become this book.

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