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THE BRITISH POWS IN BAD SCHMIEDEBERG 1945 |
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What can you remember about the flight? |
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'I can remember lying in the bottom spewing me bloody ring up! I was air sick. Because they had to queue up to go in to land. The buggers was like that, see?’ |
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Gestures a wide circle. |
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'They were going round and round and round. One would go down and then they'd go round and round and another would go down. And we were sitting on the plane like this.' |
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Pulls a sorry sick face. |
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'And I was looking out at the wing. Wobbling. Up and down. Up and down. Yer bugger! We had a sick bag. I was lying in the bloody bottom at the finish--sick as a dog!' |
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How many men were on the plane? |
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'Must have been about thirty.' |
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This sequence of eyewitness memories is continued in the Thornley Colliery to Call-Up section of the site, in the chapter headed: |
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May 1945: Back in the Colliery Inn |
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16 DLI POW HOME |
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‘Here, have some money!’ During the final collapse of the Third Reich as Allied POWs roamed free and the German Army disintegrated, conditions were chaotic in the various villages and towns between the Mulde and Elbe Rivers. My father once told me that in Halle in May 1945 he came across a British ex-POW who was in the process of walking out of a looted bank clutching bundles of Reichmarks. This receipt, click it to enlarge, confirms the story and also the date of his arrival back in Britain at ‘Reception Camp 106’ which must have been an airfield somewhere in the |