It’s Anzac Day here in New Zealand as I write. And to honour those who served, I have been researching some Hoodless forebears, or in this case a Huddless, who served in World War II. What interested me about Ronald Huddless and his WWII experience was the fact that he was a Prisoner of War for much of the war. Captured on 4th July 1942 near Fuka, in Egypt, he moved through a series of prison camps until he was liberated in April 1945. The War Office in Britain issued all liberated POWs with a questionnaire asking details of the soldier’s movements, treatment and physical condition during their time in captivity. From this document I was able to piece together Ronald’s story.
Ronald Huddless was born in New Whittington, Derbyshire 27th November 1918, sixteen days after World War I formally ended. His father Albert, worked as an iron works labourer at the Stavely Coal & Iron Works Company. Ronald was working as a miner when he enlisted on 15th November 1939, a few days before his 21st birthday and joined the 80th Anti-Tank Regiment of the Royal Artillery, which formed part of the British Army’s 50th (Northumbrian) Infantry Division.
Ronald was initially posted to an anti-aircraft base depot in the Middle East on 26th March 1941. The British Army had been engaged in a series of battles against the Axis forces of Italy and Germany, led by Mussonlini and Rommel, to defend access to its Egyptian assets. They’d suffered a series of major defeats at Gazala and Tobruk where the Axis, under Rommel, took control of the North African coast, forcing the British to retreat east towards the Egyptian border. The British Mediterranean Fleet was stationed at the port of Alexandria and it was essential they maintain control of the Suez Canal, which was critical for oil and the logistics of supplying its forces across the Empire. Rommel’s mission was to break through the line and expel the British out of Egypt.
Egypt & Cyrenaica, Libya: Map of the Western Desert Campaign and its Operation Compass Battle Area 1941
According to his discharge questionnaire, Ronald was captured at Fuka and his Royal Artillery tracer card reports him MIA on 29th June 1942. This places him at the Battle of Mersa Matruh, an offensive against Rommel’s Panzer divisions designed to buy General Auchinleck time to prepare to defend the German advance into Egypt at El Alamein, a little over 100km away. Mersa Matruh was a disastrous defeat for the British Army with Rommel capturing around 6000 prisoners and valuable supplies and equipment and another 1600 were taken prisoner as they retreated towards El Alamein.
From here, along with thousands of other prisoners, Ronald was taken to an Italian prison camp PG 166 in the Sidi Hussein district of Benghazi. He arrived there on 4th July and was held there for 4 months. There are accounts of the horrendous journey, a forced march in the desert heat, with little water and no food back to a holding cage, which little more than an open area sectioned off with barbed wire, to wait for transport.
From Daba back to Benghazi prisoners were taken in large Italian trucks, sometimes in trailers, and often packed so tightly that it was only possible to stand. The journey by the coastal road took some four or five days, with stops at night wherever there was a barbed-wire pen to hold the prisoners. There was some kicking and the use of rifle butts by Italian guards, and the ration of biscuit and bully beef was all too little; but after the tortures of thirst during the first two days of captivity, men felt that so long as there was a reasonable amount of water they had something to be thankful for. The more fortunate were allowed to swim at Sollum or to wallow at a water point en route.
Prisoners of War – W. Wynne Mason, 1954
After the resounding British come back victory at El Alamein under General Bernard Montgomery’s direction in October 1942, the British began to push west again and regain all the territory lost to Rommel’s Panzergruppen. The camps in Benghazi were vulnerable and the Italians began to ship out prisoners of war back to Italy. Ronald left Benghazi 4th November 1942 and arrived eventually in early December at a transit camp known as PG 66 in Capua, just north of Naples. He stayed here from 9th December 1942 until 29th January 1943, a grim Christmas and New Year, I’m sure.
…. twenty men allocated to a tent, a slum serving as a staging camp, and outside the wire stretched a large cleared paddock used as a training ground for Italian soldiers, we were forced to spend much time gazing over the fields like caged animals
Alex Barnett former POW
From there Ronald was moved further north to PG 70 Monte Urano, a small town in the Marche region a few kilometers from the eastern Italian sea board. This camp held as many as 7000-8000 POWs around this time. He arrived there on 2nd February and was still there in September 1943 for the collapse of the Italian fascist regime and the fall of Mussolini. The new Italian government signed an Armistice with the Allies on 8th September 1943 and the Germans swiftly took control of the POW camps throughout Italy with the purpose of shipping POWs en masse back to camps in German controlled territory, to provide the Reich with much needed labour.
On 28th September 1943 Ronald was put on a train and sent to Stalag 4F located near Hartmannsdorff, in the Saxony region of Germany. He remained there for the rest of the war. There POW’s were formed into working parties and placed in satellite camps around the district to provide various labour tasks. Ronald’s group according to his paperwork, were detailed to do railway maintenance at Reichenbach.
There is a very detailed report made by the British/American Red Cross who visited the camp 18th – 21st March 1945, a month before it was liberated. It describes there being 5800 British POWs and 3000 American POWs at Stalag 4F who made up a total of 151 working parties. The work they were forced to undertake was varied and included:
- 10 or 12 hour shifts in a coal mine, one day off every three weeks.
- 60-64 hours per week cleaning engines and maintaining railway lines, every 2nd Sunday off.
- factory work 8-9 hours per day seven days a week.
- building work 9-10 hours per day every third Sunday off
- clearing bombed streets and buildings daily 8 hours – Sundays free.
- factory work processing lignite 9-10 hours per day, every 3rd Sunday off.
- working in a paper factory – 9 hours per day. No Sunday work.
- making air raid shelters 10 hours per day – no Sunday work.
- railway work average of 10 hours per day, just started Sunday work.
- stone quarry work, 9 hours a day. Sunday work occasionally.
- excavating sand and shovelling work repairing roads 10-11 hours daily.
Back breaking work, long strenuous hours, limited downtime, poor quality rations, cramped, cold and unsanitary conditions. The Red Cross throughout the war in Europe were shipping food parcels and medical supplies to these camps to supplement food rations and from time to time were allowed to inspect the conditions and monitor the treatment of the prisoners, checking there were adequate medical facilities, chaplains, precautions taken against air raids, listen to any complaints from the prisoners representatives and they would attempt to rectify problems or shortcomings by talking to the Stalag command.
Stalag 4F was liberated by the Americans by 21st April 1945. We see the notation on Ronald’s card that he was Y List on 28th April 1945. A list that recorded prisoners of war returning home. Ronald was then transferred to a series of alternative regiments until finally on 4th December 1945 he received a Class B release and was transferred to a territorial reserves unit. It’s very hard to imagine the toll such an experience over the course of six long years would have taken. But Ronald married almost immediately on his return to civilian life, in December that year – an action I like to think shows his resilience and determination to resume a normal life – and went on to have a son in 1950.