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to sign a chit for the socks only. They, again, had come from the UK via the Red Cross. I was to be reminded of that transaction some time in the future. There was assembled, as we prepared to leave that dreaded camp, a group of 150 souls. It was a group made up entirely of officers, 12 of them British including Jimmy and myself and the other 138 all United States Army Air Force officers. My NCO crew members were not part of the group which embraced officers of the two air force Services only. The senior amongst us was a USAAF Major and this was the first time I really wished I had sewn on my half stripe before taking off on that fateful morning of March 15th just five days before. We would at least have had a British officer of equal rank, which might have had its advantages, but we were outnumbered to an extent which would have made the American the only choice as the senior. Six Wehrmacht guards were assigned to us, all of them middle-aged except for one younger NCO who was in charge.


It is from this moment on that my memory of the detailed chronology of our travels is dimmed by the speed at which events happened and by the mists of time. It all concerns a story of nearly half a century ago. So I can only do my best to recount some of the more notable adventures that befell us on our trek by foot, by road and by rail over the next three weeks. And now, for the first of so many times that we got very sick of the sound of it, came the cry from our American leader, ‘Let’s go, men!’


* * * * * O


n that day of March 20th all of us now setting off for some unknown, new prison camp further into Germany knew that the War had already been won. It just needed to end. And we needed to survive. We needed to survive perhaps for only a few weeks, a month or two at the most. Survival became the consuming thought. German prison camps might be full of unhappy inmates plotting and planning to escape and it was, indeed, an officer’s duty to try to escape but I doubt if one of us nourished that ambition and in the next few weeks there was not a single attempt to evade our guards. Our greatest ambition was to get inside another prison camp where, perhaps, there would be Red Cross parcels and some regular food. Above all, there would be safety – survival. It was safer inside.


There was certainly danger now wherever we went. The Allies had by this time achieved not just air superiority but total air supremacy. There is a difference. Air supremacy meant that our aircraft could fly the skies over Germany at will, untroubled by any fear of an opposing fighter and concerning themselves only with such anti-aircraft fire as the enemy could put up. By night, the Germans could still mount some fighter attacks but by day the Allied aircraft roamed the skies at 2,000ft weaving about in an apparently nonchalant way, picking their


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