The Great Épinal Escape E-Book

Ghee Bowman

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 451

Beschreibung

On 11 May 1944, just four weeks before D-Day, sixty-seven American heavy bombers dropped 168 tons of bombs on the sunlit French town of Épinal on the Moselle river. Unbeknownst to the aircrew of the 'Mighty Eighth', this was the temporary home of over 3,000 Indian prisoners of war – and these bombs had just taken down the walls. The escapees took food and clothes and set off for the border. If they could make it to Switzerland, neutral territory, they would be safe. But between them and their goal were thousands of Nazis, collaborators and over 100km of French countryside. The Great Épinal Escape is the incredible story of the most successful escape of the Second World War. It is the story of how, during a period showcasing the worst of humanity – a period marked by brutality, bloodlust and fascism – ordinary people were able to demonstrate the best of humanity: resilience, support and a warm welcome. Ultimately, it is a story of hope.

Leseprobe

First published 2024

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Ghee Bowman, 2024

The right of Ghee Bowman to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

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

ISBN 978 1 80399 501 4

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

Dedicated to Alex and Hans: With thanks for all you’ve taught me.

The names of men who really make history are often kept out of it.

Mohan Singh,Mohan Singh Soldiers’ Contribution to Indian Independence(New Delhi: Army Educational Stores, 1974), p.337.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Map

Indian Army Ranks

Glossary

Prologue: An Unknown Story

PART I: BACKGROUND

1    The Indian Army in Africa and Europe

2    Many Rivers to Cross

3    Stalags and Oflags

PART II: ÉPINAL

4    Frontstalag 315

5    H-Hour

6    Climb Every Mountain

7    The Twain Shall Meet

8    Barbed Wire and Borderstones

9    Resistance

10  Willkommen, Bienvenue, Benvenuti

11  Indian Summer

12  Stuck in Europe

Epilogue: The Greatest Escape?

Appendix 1: The 500 Épinal Escapees

Appendix 2: Before and After Épinal

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Notes

List of Illustrations

Fig. 1 A group of Indian POWs at Altenburg, June 1941. (V-P-HIST-03103-15, ICRC)

Fig. 2 Sikhs at prayer at Altenburg, June 1941. (V-P-HIST-03518-05, ICRC)

Fig. 3 Tug of war at Limburg, 1944. (V-P-HIST-E-00531, ICRC)

Fig. 4 Harbakhash Singh skiing at Adelboden. (Photo: Klopfenstein, Adelboden)

Fig. 5 Staff of the Indian Comforts Fund outside India House. (Papers of Leo Amery, AMEL 10/38, Churchill Archives Centre)

Fig. 6 Gateway to the barracks at Épinal, the central part of the POW camp.

Fig. 7 Some of the medical staff at Épinal. (V-P-HIST-03441-25A, ICRC)

Fig. 8

Snow at Épinal, February 1944. (V-P-HIST-03439-22, ICRC)

Fig. 9 Clearing the rubble, 26 June 1944. (V-P-HIST-03436-02A, ICRC)

Fig. 10 Map of the ‘Bombardement du 11 Mai 1944’. (Archives Départementale Des Vosges, 16 W 17)

Fig. 11 Escapers on the steps of the presbytère at Étobon. (Jules Perret, Photo Presbytère Évadés, 1944, Société d’Émulation de Montbéliard, Fonds Jean-Marc Debard)

Fig. 12 Jules Perret. (L’illustré magazine)

Fig. 13 Charlotte Biediger in traditional Alsacienne costume in 1937. (Private collection)

Fig. 14 German at the Swiss frontier, near Delle. (Private collection)

Fig. 15 New arrivals in Boncourt, May 1944. (Private Collection)

Fig. 16 Harkabir Rai. (Fauji Akhbar, The United Service Institution of India)

Fig. 17 After the delousing process in Olten, a naik collects his clean clothes. (Swiss Federal Archives; J1.257#1997/157#25*)

Fig. 18 12 April 1945, the liberation of Oflag 79 by Gordon Horner, For You the War is Over (London: Falcon Press, 1948)

Fig. 19 Gurkha ex-POWs at a funfair in London, summer 1945. (Fauji Akhbar, The United Service Institution of India)

Fig. 20 Arrivals at Lahore Station. (Fauji Akhbar, The United Service Institution of India)

Fig. 21 Épinal Cemetery. (Ghee Bowman)

Fig. 22 Dignitaries leaving the Mairie after the Croix de Guerre ceremony at Étobon, 1949. (L’illustré magazine)

Fig. 23 Suresh and Samsher holding a portrait of their father, Jai Lall. (Ghee Bowman, 2023)

Fig. 24 Some of the Épinal escapers, February 1945. (Fauji Akhbar, The United Service Institution of India)

Map

Indian Army Ranks

Throughout the text, soldiers are identified by the rank they held during the war, although many of them rose to a higher rank later.

Viceroy’s Commissioned Officers (VCOs)

Rank

Used in Which Service?

UK Equivalent

Jemadar

All

Lieutenant

Subedar

Infantry

Captain

Subedar-Major

Infantry

Major

Risaldar

Cavalry

Captain

Risaldar-Major

Cavalry

Major

Non-Commissioned Officers (NCOs)

Rank

Used in Which Service?

UK Equivalent

Dafadar

Cavalry

Sergeant

Havildar

Infantry, artillery

Sergeant

Naik

All

Corporal

Lance Dafadar

Cavalry

Corporal

Lance Havildar

Infantry, artillery

Corporal

Lance Naik

All

Lance Corporal

Privates

Rank

Used in Which Service?

Ambulance Sepoy

Indian Army Medical Corps

Driver

Royal Indian Army Service Corps

Armourer

Indian Army Ordnance Corps

Fitter

Indian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers

Gunner

Artillery

Pioneer

Pioneer Corps

Labourer

Pioneer Corps

Rifleman

Gurkhas

Sapper

Sappers & Miners

Sepoy

Infantry

Sowar

Cavalry, Army Remount Depot

Followers and Tradesmen

Rank

Used in Which Service?

Barber

All

Bellows boy

RIASC (Animal Transport Company)

Blacksmith

RIASC (Animal Transport Company), IAOC

Bootmaker

All

Carpenter

RIASC, IAOC, IAMC

Cook

All

Dhobi (washerman)

All

Farrier

RIASC (Animal Transport Company)

Groom

RIASC, ARD

Hammerman

RIASC (Animal Transport Company)

Mess servant

All

Saddler

RIASC, IAOC

Servant bearer batman

All

Sweeper

All

Tailor

All

Water carrier/bhisti

All

Glossary

ARD

Army Remount Depot

ATC

Animal Transport Company

Axis

Those countries fighting against the Allies: principally Germany and Austria, Italy, Japan

Baccu

Shelter built in the woods

BBC

British Broadcasting Corporation

CSDIC

Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre

FFI

Forces françaises de l’Intérieur – the name for the French Resistance after D-Day

Gurdwara

A Sikh place of worship

Guru Granth Sahib

Sikh holy book

Halal

Permitted for Muslims (especially used for food)

Heer/Wehrmacht

German Army

ICF

Indian Comforts Fund

ICRC

International Committee of the Red Cross

INA

Indian National Army

IOM

Indian Order of Merit – the second-highest medal awarded during the Second World War, after the Victoria Cross

Kriegie/Kriegsgefangener

POW

Kriegsmarine

German Navy

Lagergeld

Camp money

Lascar

Sailor from Asia in British Merchant Navy

Lazarette

Hospital attached to a POW camp

Legion Freies Indien/Azad Hind Fauj

Free Indian Legion or Free Indian Army

Luftwaffe

German Air Force

Maquis

French Resistance in rural areas

MI9

That part of British Military Intelligence responsible for POW camps

Marlag und Milag Nord

German POW camp for sailors and merchant navy

NCO

Non-commissioned officer

Oflag

German POW camp for officers (Offizierlager)

POW

Prisoner of war

RAF

Royal Air Force

RAMC

Royal Army Medical Corps

Reich

Empire

Reichsmark/Rentenmark/pfennig

German currency

SHAEF

Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force

Stalag

German POW camp for other ranks (Stammlager)

USAAF

United States Army Air Force

VCO

Viceroy’s Commissioned Officer – a series of ranks between NCO and officer, particular to the Indian Army

Vichy

The collaborationist French government between summer 1940 and summer 1944

YMCA

Young Men’s Christian Association

Prologue: An Unknown Story

The memories of my experience during World War II have been my constant companions. They are as fresh in my mind today as they were decades ago1

London, Sunday, 21 May 1944, morning. The city is awake, in its fifth year of war, the weather is cloudy but dry.2 The invasion of Western Europe and the opening of the Second Front is on everyone’s mind. The previous day, The Times had published a short article entitled ‘The Tragedy of Stalag Luft III’, which detailed the shooting of forty-seven Allied officers who had escaped from that air force camp.3 London is tense, expectant, on edge.

At 8 a.m. at the War Office, the building opposite Horseguards, where the Household Cavalry stand vigil, a telegram marked ‘Secret’ arrives. It comes from the Swiss capital, Berne, and was written the previous evening in code on a One Time Pad, using a random secret key. The message is from Henry Antrobus Cartwright, the British Military Attaché in the Swiss capital, and is short – sparse even. Addressed to MI9, the part of the War Office responsible for prisoners of war, it reads:

Swiss internal authorities inform me that up to midday today 186 Indian prisoners of war who escaped from camp near Epinal as a result of recent bombing there have entered Switzerland and are at present being kept in Porrentruy district. One man was killed by Germans when swimming a river on the frontier and his body was recovered by fellow escapers.4

Three days later, after considerable press speculation, a further telegram arrives from Berne, based on information gleaned from escapers. This message gives the names of some of the prisoners, details the bombing by the Americans and the loss of life, and relates some of the circumstances of the journey to the neutral frontier. The total number of escapers in Switzerland has reached 278, and that number will continue to rise over the next few weeks. Although not all the information in the telegram proved to be completely accurate, the core of it was true: this was a mass escape unlike any seen before.

The escapers included Barkat Ali from Punjab, who is buried in a cemetery at Vevey beside Lake Geneva. There was also a Gurkha called Harkabahadur Rai, who escaped and joined the French Resistance in a fierce battle in the mountains south of Belfort. Their comrade A.P. Mukandan was a postman by trade, captured at Mersa Matruh in Egypt in 1942. He escaped from Épinal but was recaptured, and wrote of his experience in a fascinating and detailed account. They were assisted along their way by hundreds of French people ready to guide, feed and support, among them the blacksmith-farmer Jules Perret in the village of Étobon.

The story of the escapes, and the support given in France, is completely unknown. No film has been made, no book written, no article exists on the internet or in an academic journal.5 The Stalag Luft III escape, however, is well known – it would go on to become a book and later the film, The Great Escape, made memorable by Steve McQueen jumping over barbed wire on a motorbike.6 In fact the Great Épinal Escape involved many more escapers, and many more successes, but as the escapers’ faces were brown not white, and as they were not officers, their experience has languished in the pool of the unremembered for eighty years.7

This book will tell their story in full.

This book will also tell the wider story of the 15,000 Indian Army prisoners who went through German hands during the war.8 They were Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus, Indian Christians and Gurkhas from right across South Asia, part of the 2.5 million-strong Indian Army, all volunteers. They had been taken prisoner in North Africa, France, Italy, Greece and Ethiopia, and on the high seas. They endured up to five long years behind barbed wire, making music, learning languages, grumbling about the food and praying to God.

Some of these men got free of the walls and the barbed wire and found their way to safety, helped by generous French peasants and welcomed by the multilingual people of Switzerland. During a period of the worst of humanity, a period marked by brutality, bloodlust and fascism, ordinary people were able to demonstrate the best of humanity: resilience, support and a warm welcome. Ultimately, this is a story of hope.

Part I

Background

1

The Indian Army in Africa and Europe

Lo! I have flung to the East and West

Priceless treasures torn from my breast,

And yielded the sons of my stricken womb

To the drum-beats of duty, the sabres of doom.1

Barkat Ali came from Punjab and Harkabahadur Rai from Nepal, two of the traditional British recruiting grounds. British recruitment was based on the so-called Martial Race Theory, the widely held belief that some people were inherently good at fighting – it was ‘in their blood’.2 Europe in the 1930s and 1940s witnessed the historical high point of racism. Nazism was an attempt to make racism the dominant world order. It failed.

But racism was not restricted to Germany. It was built into the British imperial system and built into the Indian Army as part of that imperial system. Young men from Punjab – Sikhs and Muslims – were praised as warriors and targeted for the army. Meanwhile, young men from Bengal were seen as weak, effeminate ‘babus’, who were good only for clerical work and could never fight. Pressure on numbers throughout the Second World War would see the abandonment of that prejudice, from necessity rather than principle, and the 2.5 million men who served came from across the subcontinent, as did the 15,000 who became prisoners of the Germans.

This was an army in transition, from a country in transition. Indian opinions about the war were divided – talking of ‘Undivided India’ at the time is an illusion. The politicians, the people, even the type of government varied enormously across India. While Sikandar Hayat Khan’s Unionist Party in Punjab was all-out in favour of the British and Jinnah’s Muslim League took a broadly pro-British stance, the Congress Party took an altogether different line.

With the idea of independence firmly in their sights, Mohandas K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru – although both anti-fascist in outlook – were not prepared to support the British war effort unless and until independence was secured. For Churchill and the British Viceroy, everything else was secondary to winning the war. For Gandhi and Nehru, it was the reverse: independence came first and ‘All other issues are subordinate’.3

Yet another view was held by many, led by Subhas Chandra Bose, previously President of the Congress Party. Bose – known as ‘Netaji’, or respected leader – saw Britain as the enemy, and with the irrefutable logic of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’, sought to find ways to enlist Indians in armies that would fight against Britain and on the side of the Germans and Japanese.

Indian soldiers – even fellow Bengalis – had mixed feelings about Bose. A young army medical officer called Dutt, although a nationalist, ‘was conflicted … he didn’t agree that Indians should join the Axis … you don’t consort with evil to get something done … he decided he would fight on the side of the right’.4

The men in Épinal and the other European prisoner-of-war (POW) camps came from across this spectrum, sometimes with loyalties that changed more than once.

Some of the future recruits to Bose’s forces were already officers in the Indian Army, men like Mohan Singh of the 1/14th Punjabs, with five years’ experience under his belt. He wrote later that soldiers of free nations ‘fought because freedom of their country is their first duty, whereas the Indian soldiers fought because they were paid for it by our alien rulers’.5

This view of the Indian Army as being essentially composed of mercenaries is at least partly true. The motivations that brought young Indians to the recruiting officer were of course a mixture, as are those of any soldier. Unlike in Britain and the White Dominions, there was no conscription in imperial India, so historians sometimes talk of the 2.5 million men as ‘the largest volunteer army ever’.6 The word ‘volunteer’ carries overtones of volition or choice, but many sepoys had little choice. They joined up because it was expected of them; because their forefathers and cousins had joined; because it was tradition. They could look at the old soldiers back in the village with their medal ribbons and their strips of land and know that this was a way to secure the future prosperity of their family, as well as the immediate fullness of their belly. Every Indian soldier sent back money to his family, and many villages in Punjab and Nepal owed most of their income to these remittances. An anonymous Épinal escapee reflected on his experience of soldiering as a career move, years later in Switzerland:

All Indian soldiers are volunteers. I signed up when I was 16 years old … In peacetime there were many [of us], the English did not make us aware that there could be war. Englishmen, also Indian officers, led our training, which was not very strict. Once a night march lasted until 2 a.m., then we were brought in on trucks to the barracks. We shot for a week a year with our guns and machine guns. We also got trained for transport vehicles. We had vacation for 3 whole months a year, plus 10 days at Christmas. Once there was a 3-day field service exercise, but there was no live shooting.7

That sentence, ‘the English did not make us aware that there could be war’, is significant. Despite the evidence of history, many of these young men had no idea that they would be transported in ships around the globe, be shot at by other uniformed men and spend years behind barbed wire.

Some of the Indian Army prisoners were officers, and some of those were Indians. By 1939, the Indian Army was deep into a process of ‘Indianisation’: the gradual replacement of the old white British officer class with indigenous Indians, a process that was massively accelerated over the following ten years of war and independence. Many of the senior-most officers of the post-Partition Indian and Pakistani armies had been trained by the British in the 1920s and 1930s; men like Kodandera Madappa Cariappa, the first Indian Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army, and Muhammad Akbar Khan – with the Pakistan Army No. PA1 – were among the very first Indians to receive a King’s Commission, training together at Indore in 1919.8 There were also many Indian medical officers, even one in the British Army itself, and the medical needs of many POWs – Indians and others – were met by doctors from India.9

As well as the officer ranks that would have been familiar in any army, the Indian Army featured some strange ranks that would prove difficult for the Germans to delineate and would lead to tension in POW camps. These were the Viceroy’s commissioned officers, or VCOs – jemadars, subedars and risaldars – situated between non-commissioned officers (NCOs) and King’s commissioned officers (KCOs). VCOs were men who had come up through the ranks, often after many years of service, and commanded a platoon or troop. Before the Indianisation process, this was as high as an Indian could get in the Indian Army.

Besides reducing the need for white British officers in a regiment, their job was in some ways that of cultural and linguistic interpretation – helping the men to understand the British and the officers to understand the Indians. The Germans were confused over the VCOs’ status and requested clarification from the British via the Red Cross.10 The British preference was that they should be treated as equivalent to officers and housed in the same camps, and the Germans duly went along with this.

An additional complication was the status of Indian warrant officers, who were accustomed to being treated the same as VCOs in India.11 In fact, they were transferred around from officers’ camp to privates’ camp, and a group of eleven of them wrote a letter of complaint to the Swiss authorities about this upgrading and downgrading, eloquently pointing out the advantages of the officers’ camp.12

One officer POW was Santi Pada Dutt, from Dhaka in East Bengal, who had been a newly trained doctor aged 25 when the war started. His daughter described his first meeting with a Briton called Masters – the Adjutant of the 4th Gurkha Rifles, his new regiment:

My father walked into his office. Masters greeted him.

‘What’s your name?’

He gave him his last name.

‘What’s your Christian name?’

My father stopped and said, ‘I don’t have a Christian name.’

‘Don’t waste my time!’

‘I’m not a Christian, I’m a Hindu. I don’t have a Christian name! I do have a middle name and a first name.’

Masters had a long history with India – to my surprise something as basic as this hadn’t occurred to him.

Masters then spoke to Colonel Wheland and said, ‘I think this chap is a good egg – he will do well for our medical officer’.13

Dutt was captured at the Battle of the Cauldron in June 1942 and imprisoned in Italy. He was later awarded the Military Cross for his heroism in continuing to treat wounded Gurkhas while being bombarded by German artillery and then overrun.14 Later, Dr Dutt said of his decision to remain with the troops, ‘How could I leave them? They were my boys.’15

Among the very first Indian ‘boys’ to become prisoners of the Germans were those who were not soldiers, nor even military men, but lascars – sailors of the Merchant Navy. Trade was the lifeblood of empire, and the ships of the Merchant Marine were the blood vessels. The size and scale of the docks in London and Glasgow – as well as their counterparts in Calcutta and Cape Town – testify to the central importance of ships to the imperial project, with grain, raw materials and cotton arriving in Britain and manufactured goods going out.

To facilitate that process and increase the workforce, Europeans had been using Indian sailors since Vasco Da Gama hired an Indian pilot from East Africa in 1498.16 British ships employed Indians in increasing numbers from the eighteenth century, and such sailors formed part of the first Indian communities in Britain. Not only were they cheap – earning around a sixth of the rate of Europeans – they were also ‘good, efficient sailors’.17

In time of war, Indians were used as crew on merchant ships that had released their European sailors for the Royal Navy. Such lascars (the name was applied to men from anywhere east of the Cape of Good Hope) formed an increasingly large proportion of the Merchant Navy as the twentieth century advanced. By 1938, more than a quarter of the Merchant Navy workforce was Indian – around 50,000 men.18 Muslims from Sylhet and Punjab could be found in the engine room, Hindus were employed as deckhands, while stewards and catering staff – in daily contact with European officers – tended to be recruited in Goa and Cochin.19

The lascars sailed all round the world and many of them landed in Britain – around 55,000 every year in peacetime.20 Hostels had been established in port cities for many years, and some had settled in the UK, notably in Cardiff, London and South Shields. Ison Alli, a Fireman and Trimmer on board SS Iceland, lived in Swansea and was married to a woman called Iris – he would spend many years behind bars.21 As soon as the war started, merchant ships were targeted by the German navy, and many of their crew suffered a similar fate. The very first Indians interned by the Germans, in fact, were Indian crew on German ships like the Trautenfels. Some 238 such men were immediately imprisoned at the start of the war and released in February 1940 via Rotterdam.22

The first Indian soldiers to be imprisoned were also in the business of delivering supplies and were captured in France. The 22nd Animal Transport Company of the Royal Indian Army Service Corps were captured on 25 June 1940, at Gérardmer, not far from Épinal.23 These men would go on to become the longest-serving Indian prisoners of the war, passing through many camps. They included one Indian commissioned officer – Captain Anis Ahmed Khan. By the next summer, most of them were in Stalag VIIIB in Poland – Lamsdorf – a camp that would house many Indians over the next few years.24

The next Indian officer to be taken prisoner was probably Shaukat Hayat Khan, caught up in the campaign in East Africa, where the Italians had occupied Ethiopia in 1936 and attacked British Somaliland in August 1940.25 Shaukat was part of the 5th Indian Division in East Africa, and was captured in his first day of battle. With four other officers, including a South African, a Rhodesian, an RAF pilot and a Welshman, he dug a tunnel 150ft long from the camp at Adi Ugri. This was a ‘back-breaking job’, digging naked, using tools shaped from metal bedsteads, while being harassed by rats. The air supply was provided via a pump made from empty tins and shoe leather, and comrades up above made a non-stop musical show to cover the noise – classic Stalag antics. One day before they were ready to break out, in March 1941, the Italians pulled out and the POWs were released. Khan was immediately taken to hospital and then rejoined his regiment.26

Khan’s 5th Indian Division went from East Africa to North Africa, becoming a key part of the fabled 8th Army. The Middle East held a paramount importance for Britain, forming the central body – together with India – of the Empire. Egypt served as the base camp for the whole region, from which the British sought to crush the nascent Italian empire, maintain naval supremacy in the Mediterranean and keep trade routes open.27 Hitler understood the strategic importance of the region, and planned to push through in 1942, seize the Suez Canal and link up with the Japanese advance from the east.28 India therefore assumed a crucial importance to both sides, but much of its army was away from home, defending far-flung territories of the Empire.

The 8th Army became one of the most multicultural in the world, with troops from across Africa, Palestine and the White Dominions, as well as many from India. The 4th Indian Division had been the first in Egypt, arriving in September 1939 and featuring in an early propaganda film shown in Indian cinemas.29

Many famous Indian regiments were to be tested in the sand and sun of Egypt, Libya and Tunisia. Over a period of two years – from September 1940 till November 1942 – the pendulum of success in the desert swung repeatedly east and west: the final eastward swing being in 1942, when the Axis reached El Alamein. After the protracted defensive battle there, the Allies advanced inexorably, all the way to Tunisia, until finally pushing the Germans and Italians out of North Africa in May 1943.

The first substantial loss of Indian soldiers as prisoners came in April 1941, at an obscure Turkish stone fort near Derna in Libya. This was El Mechili, which had been captured by Commonwealth forces during the first successful advance in January 1941. Three months later, the whole garrison of around 3,000 men was surrounded and captured by the Italians. They included a young man of 30 years called Beant Singh Sandhu. He is something of a rarity among sepoys in that we have a named photo of him, taken in Switzerland in 1944, after his successful escape from Épinal.30

He was a Sikh from Montgomery district in Punjab, now Sahiwal in Pakistan. His father – Fauja Singh – was a decorated veteran of the First World War, who had risen to the rank of Subedar Major, so Beant was one of the many Punjabis who joined as part of family tradition. By 1941, he was a dafadar in Prince Albert Victor’s Own Cavalry, also known as PAVO. In 1941, the PAVO – together with the 2nd Royal Lancers and the 18th King Edward’s Own Cavalry – were part of the 3rd Indian Motor Brigade, going through the process of converting from horses to tanks. By this stage, the men were transported by lorry and Bren Gun carrier, armed only with 2-pounder anti-tank guns and 3in mortars.31

Those taken prisoner in the uneven fight at El Mechili included half the PAVO and 459 men of the 2nd Royal Lancers – three-quarters of their strength.32 The historian of the Lancers called this a ‘crippling loss’ to a regiment of regulars who ‘from officer down to sowar had worked and lived together for years’.33 The impact of imprisonment was wide – on families and communities at home, but also on regiments and their esprit de corps. In fact, the prisoners of the 2nd Lancers had a high escape rate, including men whose story will be told in the next chapter, part of which may be accounted for by that very strong sense of connection to the regiment and to each other.34

The next haul of prisoners was in December 1941, when two companies of the 5th Mahratta Light Infantry were ‘overwhelmed by the enemy during the night’ at Bir El Ghabi, south of Tobruk in Libya.35 This was a heavy loss, but only the first of many. The following month, over 200 men of the 4/16 Punjabs were taken at Benghazi in Rommel’s counterattack.

The year 1942 was the peak for Indians taken prisoner in North Africa. As Rommel’s Afrika Korps swept eastwards, forts and towns and defensive boxes fell, and many of the experienced pre-war regular soldiers who had been in the army for many years were snapped up.

In May 1942, Indian soldiers were involved in the crucial battle of Bir Hakeim, another old Turkish fort at a desert spring. The Arabic name means ‘Well of Wisdom’, and the name is usually remembered as Bir Hacheim in South Asia. This battle is especially well remembered in France, representing the first major encounter of the Free French forces, who held off the Axis forces for several days, buying valuable time. The Indian 3rd Motor Brigade was also involved, and the 2nd Lancers lost a further 122 men as POWs.36

The greatest loss of Indians, however, was to the 1st Regiment of Indian artillery, which ‘suffered so heavily that it had to be broken up temporarily’.37 On 27 May, they were attacked by two German Panzer Divisions and the Italian elite Ariete Division. The artillery acquitted themselves well, destroying eighty tanks with their 25-pounder guns, earning many medals. Some 400 men were killed or captured and twenty-four officers taken prisoner, including Indians like Naravane and Kumaramangalam, who would go on to the most senior posts after the war.38 Winston Churchill praised the Motor Brigade in the House of Commons, and the battle is remembered in the regiment to this day as ‘a legend that will never die’.39

Shortly afterwards, more Indians were taken prisoner at the so-called Cauldron, a series of minefields near Bir Hacheim. More than 500 men of the 4/10 Baluch Regiment, over 600 of the 2/4 Gurkhas and half a battalion of the 13 Frontier Force Rifles were surrounded and captured by the Germans.40 Among the Gurkhas was Dr Dutt, and among the Baluchs was the Punjabi Siddiq Khan, an Épinal escaper.

One regiment of the Indian Army that was particularly unlucky during the war was the 18th Royal Garhwal Rifles, among them Rifleman Bhopal Sing Negi. In 1931, Bhopal Sing Negi had been just 19. Like other boys of the high country, he was interested in advancing his career, earning some money and getting out of the valley. So, he walked the 7 miles down the zigzag paths to the river and found transport from Augustmuni to Lansdowne, headquarters of the Garhwal Rifles. Medical tests, aptitude, fitness – all went fine – so on 23 October, he signed up to the colours, joining the regiment’s 3rd Battalion.41

The region in which young Bhopal lived – now part of Uttarakhand – is in the northern, mountainous fringe of India, butting up against Tibet and Nepal. The people look somewhat like the folk of Nepal, the climate is milder, reminding the Britishers of ‘Blighty’. India’s second-highest mountain – Nanda Devi – rises there, blessing the land with streams which form the headwaters of the Ganga, the most holy river in the country.42 This is a special country, with forests of chestnuts, black-barked pines and deodar trees – timber of the gods, widely used for furniture – climbing up the mountainsides, which teem with flowers, colourful birds and small mammals. Going from such lush hills to the dry, flat deserts of the Middle East must have been a considerable culture shock to Bhopal when he left in the monsoon season of 1940. This would not be his last culture shock, however.

Having joined up in peacetime in 1931, Bhopal served the customary seven years with the colours, married Sobati Devi and was put on the reserve list in November 1938, ten months before war broke out. Having returned his kit in February, he received it all back again in November, when he was recalled to prepare for a war between European empires. In September 1940, the 3rd Battalion embarked at Bombay and sailed off westwards across the Indian Ocean. Past Aden, through the straits at Bab al Mandab (or Gate of Lamentation), and into the Red Sea. At Port Sudan, they unloaded and drove cross-country, joining the small Commonwealth force at Gallabat, on the border with Italian-occupied Abyssinia. They fought with distinction there – Gallabat Day is still a regimental celebration – and went on to be part of the Commonwealth victory at Keren, where the first Indian Victoria Cross of the war was won by Premindra Singh Bhagat of the Sappers and Miners. By the summer of 1942, the men of the Garhwals had been posted around the region, in Sudan, Eritrea, Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Cyprus, winning many medals.

At this stage, the Germans and Italians had their tails up. The Commonwealth 8th Army were in retreat, trying to stem the flow of Rommel’s Afrika Korps, and the 3rd Garhwalis were just the latest unit to get in their way. On 18 June, the Garhwalis’ retreat brought them to Gambut in eastern Libya, where they found themselves surrounded by tanks of the German 15th and 21st Panzer Divisions. The Indians tried to break away southwards into the desert, but only five vehicles made it through. On this terrible day, nearly the whole battalion – 555 officers, VCOs, NCOs, riflemen and followers – were captured, among them 30-year-old rifleman Bhopal Sing Negi, who would reach Switzerland two years later.43

This was to be the last of the Axis advances eastwards across the desert, taking them all the way to an obscure Egyptian railway station called Two Flags – El Alamein in Arabic – where their advance would falter and grind to a halt. On the way to that halt was one of the great Axis victories of the woeful year of 1942, the fall of Tobruk. During the previous year, this coastal city had held out against the Axis forces for 246 days, with the Commonwealth defenders – among them the 18th Indian Cavalry – becoming known as the Rats of Tobruk.44

All that was to change in June 1942. There were four brigades dug in, in defence, three from South Africa and the 11th Indian Brigade, which comprised the Cameron Highlanders, the 2/7 Gurkhas and the 2/5 Mahrattas.45 The Mahrattas and Gurkhas were posted to the eastern perimeter of the defence lines. On 20 June, they were overrun by massive tank attacks and all the Mahrattas and Gurkhas became prisoners.46

As well as the infantry, large numbers of Indian support troops became prisoners at Tobruk. The 18th Field Company of the Bombay Sappers & Miners – who had invented the Knotted Cord Drill for detecting mines – were taken, along with large numbers from the RIASC.47 There was also a Field Post Office – postmen in uniform – who were to show up later at Épinal.48 A total of 33,000 Commonwealth troops marched away westwards into captivity from Tobruk.

Famed for their kukri knives and their terai slouch hats, the 7th Gurkha Rifles were one of ten Gurkha regiments in the Indian Army at that time. Although not actually part of the Raj, Nepal was a uniquely important part of the army, with over a quarter of a million men serving in the Second World War, doubling the pre-war total. They sustained 32,000 casualties and won ten Victoria Crosses.49 After Partition, they were divided, with six regiments staying as part of the new Indian Army and the other four joining the British Army, a last vestige of the old Indian Army tradition that continues still today. Perhaps it is this post-war ongoing service that has led to the Gurkhas being so well remembered in a positive light in the UK, unlike most of their contemporaries. As one ex-officer put it:

Gurkhas are a product of the past. If they did not exist no one would now invent them. They have survived by achieving standards higher than those the modern world normally sets itself … never has a nation had such loyal and good soldiers for so long at so cheap a price.50

Featuring large in the army as they did, Gurkhas were also found in proportion in German and Italian POW camps – 936 in number, being around 10 per cent of the total.51 One of those captured at Tobruk was Harkabahadur Rai. He came from the mountainous region of Okhaldunga in eastern Nepal, not far from Sagarmāthā – Mount Everest in English. Harkabahadur was no mountaineer, however; he was a soldier of the King Emperor and keen to fight for his regimental honour. After a few years in the army, he had risen to the rank of havildar. With hundreds of his comrades, he was captured on the outskirts of Tobruk on 21 June, going on to become one of the Épinal escapers two years later.52

Alongside the 7th Gurkhas were the 5th Mahrattas. Recruited in the south-western parts of India – the Konkan and Deccan – the Mahratta Light Infantry were the inheritors of a long military tradition.53 They claim descent from Shivaji, who established the Mahratta Empire in the seventeenth century with a combination of diplomacy and military victories, and their war cry is still ‘Sri Chhatrapati Shivaji maharaj ki jai!’ (‘Victory to Maharaja Shivaji’).54 As light infantry, they march at 140 paces per minute, but this was not enough to escape the German tanks in June 1942.55 Among their number was a clerk called Ganpatrao Tawde, who would go on to be awarded the Military Medal for his work after the escape from Épinal.

The great Commonwealth victory at El Alamein was a turning point in the desert, and in the war overall. Winston Churchill later wrote, ‘Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein we never had a defeat’, and the bells in British churches rang for the first time since the start of the war.56

That victory came in November, but before that, the first battle in the summer entailed stopping the Axis advance and holding them. On the first day of the battle – 1 July 1942 – the inexperienced 18th Indian Brigade held the line at Deir El Shein. Two thirds of the men of the 4/11 Sikhs, 2/3 Gurkhas and 2/5 Essex were taken prisoner, with the Sikhs losing over 540 men, as well as ancillary services like the Bengal Sappers & Miners.57 In due course, many of the ordinary soldiers were released as their captors had insufficient supplies of water to keep them, but the officers and VCOs were transported away from the front line.58

Before these better-known battles in North Africa, however, some few hundred Indians were to fall victim to a lesser-known contribution to a little-known campaign. Following the unsuccessful drawn-out campaign by Italy against Greece, which had started in late 1940, the Germans got involved, attacking Yugoslavia and Greece simultaneously on 6 April 1941. The British had already agreed to reinforce the Greeks, sending two Australian and one New Zealand divisions, plus an English Armoured Brigade.

The Germans overran the Allied defences with remarkable rapidity, the Greek government fell, and large numbers of Commonwealth troops were evacuated by sea, but 12,000 became prisoners.59 Among those were around 120 men of the Army Remount Department, all Punjabi Muslims, who had come from India escorting 832 mules intended for supply work in the mountains.60 A later report tells us:

After handing over their animals at Kalamata, they returned to their vessel, which was lying off the coast; but before they could sail the ship was bombed and the unit had to return to land in boats. They remained in the vicinity of Kalamata for a few days, but the whole unit, together with some 200 lascars, were captured by the Germans on 29 April 1941.61

Their mules would prove useful to the Germans in their attack on the Soviet Union a few months later, but the men would have to endure up to four years of captivity before they would be free again. The conditions for these POWs in Greece were particularly bad. Clive Dunn – later famous in the UK as Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army – was then a trooper of the Hussars and wrote of a camp in Corinth where ‘thousands of British, Indians, Yugoslavs, Palestinians and others were in the process of being subjugated by means of bad conditions and fairly ruthless behaviour from the SS guards’.62 A photograph in the German Historical Museum shows several sepoys sitting in the heat of a courtyard, staring blankly at the camera.63 The grooms, cooks, farriers and sweepers must have wondered what they had let themselves in for when joining the army.

The lascars who joined them included sailors from SS Clan Fraser, which had been bombed and sunk at Piraeus in January 1941. Their Indian quartermaster was named Mohd Alli, and he displayed courage and resourcefulness at the time, as reported by one of the British officers later, ‘The wounded were got off the burning vessel by dragging them through the water on a line made fast to an overturned crane by a plucky Indian quartermaster who swam ashore with it.’64

A German correspondent called Grossmann, working for the propaganda magazine Signal, was at Corinth and wrote a report focusing on the ‘mixture of races’. Grossmann interviewed and photographed an unnamed lascar, who said:

We have been in Britain’s service for many years. We were still children when we began. We cooked for the officers and cleaned their boots. No, we did not know where we were going. We do not understand English. We travelled for a very long time. When land was in sight, our ship went down. We were below deck and just managed to get out before the boat sank. We are all good swimmers. I think we ran into a mine, or it may have been a bomb. Nobody told us anything. I am … an old man. I have never had such a good time as I am having now. I am unaccustomed to the food here, but there is nobody ordering us to do this that and the other, or to go here or go there. We need not do anything.65

A remarkable picture of captivity as luxury and leisure. That impression would not last, with the next few years taking their toll on the health and well-being of these men.

Two years later, another small group of Indians were captured in the eastern Mediterranean. After the Italian capitulation of September 1943, the Germans moved rapidly to occupy the Dodecanese Islands.66 A British brigade landed on Cos and Leros to head them off – later fictionalised in the film The Guns of Navarone. The British force included the 9th Field Company of the Madras Sappers & Miners. Two complete platoons were captured, except for three sappers who escaped by boat to the nearby Turkish coast and rejoined their unit by crossing the full breadth of Turkey to the Syrian border.67

The commanding officer of the Remount men captured in 1941 was Lieutenant Colonel Denehy, a 43-year-old decorated First World War veteran and a well-known horse breeder in the Indian Army. Denehy family legend says that the Germans were so pleased to capture the mules and their loads of ammunition at Kalamata that they told Colonel Denehy he could run away, but he refused, as the troops could speak no English or German and ‘I need to be there to look after them’.68

In fact, these men were more than capable of looking after themselves – eight of them successfully reached Switzerland from Épinal in the summer of 1944. One of those – Allah Ditta from Jhelum – earned a Mention in Despatches for his previous unsuccessful escape attempt from Stalag VC at Offenburg, and six are buried in Greece and Germany.69

It would be easy to see these men from Punjab as victims, transported thousands of miles without any understanding of what was happening to them. Some of them, however, were not prepared to sit around and wait for what would happen next but were willing and able to take responsibility for their fates, even if they died in the attempt.

2

Many Rivers to Cross

We can only guess the level of bewilderment in the German officer’s question – what was a brown man doing in white men’s war?1

Many new prisoners captured in North Africa took an early opportunity to escape. Among the many medal recommendations in the UK National Archives is the story of Shriniwas Raghavendra Kulkarni, a clerk in the Mobile Workshop Company of the Ordnance Corps. Captured during the great German advance in June 1942, he escaped two weeks later in a group of six, who ‘walked barefoot to make no noise and headed SE by the Pole Star. They skirted all camps and spent the next day hiding in a wadi’.2

He was recaptured but escaped again soon afterwards and took refuge in an Arab village, but ‘had very cut feet, so spent a month in this village being looked after by the Arabs. He had to change his abode every day to avoid detection and busied himself with [learning] Arabic.’

After a few weeks he felt his Arabic, disguise and feet were ready, so he moved on eastwards, gleaning information by selling eggs and tomatoes to Italians and Germans. He fell in with a Gurkha rifleman, also disguised, and they made themselves fake passes, as used by the local Arabs to get past the Italian Carabinieri. When they were stopped by Italian troops, they pulled out their passes and said ‘they were looking for a lost camel’, to no avail. The Italians interrogated them and a colonel pulled out his pistol, saying, ‘I know you are British and if you don’t confess now I will shoot’. Kulkarni called his bluff, repeated that he was an Arab and a Muslim and not afraid to die. The colonel was convinced, and Kulkarni escaped again.

By this time, the Allies were advancing into Libya, having defeated the Axis at El Alamein, and he was picked up by New Zealand troops soon after. This clerk in a military workshop learnt fluent Arabic, fooled the Italians and stood up to physical and mental tribulations in what an MI9 colonel described as ‘a most excellent performance’, and was awarded the Indian Order of Merit.

The treatment for other new prisoners immediately after capture was often woefully inadequate, and POWs speak of being herded and treated like animals. Many POWs taken in North Africa spent time in a large camp at Benghazi, the capital of the Cyrenaica region. This was the site of much ill-treatment and many complaints. Prisoners were made to work without payment, in contravention of the Geneva Convention, their diet was insufficient, they were beset by lice and flies and there was frequent brutality.3 One Gurkha reported there was so little water that ‘our mouths dried and there was no need to empty our bladders’.4 R.R. Dave was one of the postmen-soldiers of the 19 Field Post Office, captured at Tobruk. He wrote:

It was a wretched existence. The whole day we were kept at back-breaking fatigues in the sun. Food was bad and meagre. We were usually given a loaf of bread for every five men. It was always a problem to divide the loaf between the recipients. The total quantity was so pitifully small that a slight inaccuracy in cutting it made a quarrel inevitable … But to me these physical tortures were nothing compared to the mental anguish that I was undergoing. It was a new experience to be bullied, beaten and kicked about.5

Another havildar of the Post Office, A.P. Mukandan of 25 FPO, who later escaped from Épinal, wrote of his experience at Benghazi in great detail. He records their daily ration, which reflects the dietary habits of the Italians far more than those of Indians, including bread, tinned fish, coffee powder and sugar:

The quantity of bread was not sufficient even for one meal. So we cut our bread into small pieces and mixed it with tinned fish to cook a paste which we called rottiganji [bread-porridge]. This was consumed at the main mid-day meal. In the morning and the evening we had to be content with a cup of coffee and the odd slice of bread kept back from the ration. For cups we used discarded tins and spoons we fashioned out of bits of wood. We formed a ‘combine’ out of five friends and managed to keep a small reserve from our rations for use on the days when bread rations were issued late in the evening … Due to malnutrition, the men felt tired and exhausted and became giddy even with slight exertion. Nerves were frayed and quarrels flared up quickly. After many representations to the Camp Commandant, one hot meal of rice and beans was ordered to be issued to us in the evenings.6

This situation was far worse than conditions later in camps in Italy itself and in Germany – at least until the winter of 1944 – and is reminiscent of what prisoners of the Japanese endured at Changi and other camps. Mukandan also reports that clothes were in short supply:

Most of us had no change of clothes. For the first three months I managed with a pair of shorts, one shirt and one towel. As there was not even sufficient water to drink there was no question of washing the clothes. By October, in spite of infinite care, my shirt got torn in many places due to daily wear. As the nights began to cool and there was no hope of getting any clothes from the Italian quartermaster, I managed with the help of a friend to get an old but serviceable warm shirt in exchange for fifty cigarettes.

Keeping clean was always an issue. There was always a ‘long nudist queue’ for the shower, in which they could stand for two minutes, but the Sikhs, with their religious requirement to wear kacchera (undershorts) at all times, refused to stand naked in line.7 Like POWs and civilians throughout the theatres of war, Mukandan was infested with Pediculus humanus humanus (the body louse):

As soon as the sun came up each morning there would be crowds of men removing their shirts etc in search of these elusive and well camouflaged vermin. We used to call this operation ‘reading the morning news’! As if the army of lice were not a sufficient plague we had to feed their allies the fleas which jumped all night between the blankets and the bodies. No amount of care for personal and tent cleanliness seemed to help as the whole place was full of these pests and there was no escape from friends and visitors.

After a few months of this torment, the majority of Indian POWs were taken to Italy by boat, although some officers were flown to Europe. Mukandan shipped out on 14 October with 1,500 other Indians: