Denis Avey POW Book Review Pt 3

'Over the next few months I passed through a number of camps. I wasn't always sure where I was and looking back, it's hard to be certain in which order I visited them.' Page 100.

Broomby should have cleared up and filled in these gaps with the exact dates. He doesn't. Avey states that his POW number, 220543, was issued at the Graudenz punishment camp. My own research here has put this number in consecutive order with several thousand other ex-Italy British POWs, including several who supplied testimony and affidavits at Nuremberg and also Spectator in Hell subject Arthur Dodd (POW number 221925). Very few of these men are mentioned. There's no bibliography or suggestions for further reading, which, of course would have to include The Password is Courage and Spectator in Hell and the court testimony regarding the British POWs of Jewish survivor Norbert Wollheim--which could previously be read here:

http://www.mazal.org/archive/nmt/08/NMT08-T0591.htm (2022: dead link)

The story of the British POWs at E 715, cries out to be told in the round, as a collective story. That's been the driving force of my own research into the British POWs held there: not the story of a solitary hero, but of large groups of men drawn from almost every regiment of the British and Commonwealth armies stoically enduring whatever was thrown at them. Literally hundreds of men, some better and braver than others perhaps, but all lost for many months inside the vast tentacles the Nazi slave labour machine. Instead, the book opts for movie-style heroic individualism.

However, get past the publisher's blatant ploy to sensationalize Avey's war service and there is a worthwhile and very interesting story to be found. Despite my misgivings, I found this book to be both impressive and enlightening, not so much in the chapters dealing with Auschwitz, which by and large cover the same grim ground as The Password is Courage and Spectator in Hell, as in the evocation of Avey's time in action with the 2nd Battalion of the Rifle Brigade in 1940-41.

'The Italians weren't all Jessies...' Page 40.

Denis Avey enlisted in October 1939 (Army Number 6914761) was posted to the 2nd Battalion the Rifle Brigade, which was shipped off to fight in the Italians in the Western Desert in August 1940. Avey served as a carrier driver. The book very effectively evokes the sights and sounds of the desert campaign and, at times, Avey brings a rare reflective sensitivity to the events of 70 years ago. This is his description of one fallen comrade he had to bury in the desert:

'Long after it was over they came and cleaned up the sites of those battles. They moved buried bodies to the military cemeteries, but there were a lot they couldn't find, so they listed them on the Alamein Memorial. Bill's name is there, so he still lies where I left him, somewhere in the shifting sands of Sidi Rezegh.' Page 74.

That's a military elegy of the highest order. And this brief memory of his platoon officer gets right to the heart of how Army Other Ranks regarded the best and worst of their superiors:

'He was all right, Jimmy. He talked to us like people, not layabouts.' Page 83.

This is where the book is at its best: honest, direct and unflinching in its evocation of the life of the frontline soldier. Not a 'hero' in the lazy way the term is used nowadays by tabloid journalists to describe every surviving World War Two veteran, but the story of just one of the many members of one battalion of one brigade of one division of the British Army.

Avey has put his story on record. So many of his Other Ranks colleagues did not. Other Ranks are rarely mentioned in the official unit War Diaries of World War Two:, they're literally written out of history.

So this is valuable as an Other Rank's account of World War Two---possibly the only one by a private soldier serving in this specific unit at this time. Broomby has obviously checked Avey's story against the 2nd Battalion Rifle Brigade War Diary and thus several notable officers are mentioned at various points in the narrative. But an appendix with a detailed Roll of Honour for the the battalion would have made the book that much more interesting and worthwhile.

Six Degrees of Separation

Avey was wounded and captured in November 1941 during the battle of Sidi Rezegh. One of my father's POW colleagues at his small Bad Schmiedeberg work camp in Germany, Rifleman John H S Hiley, was also in the 2nd Battalion Rifle Brigade and was captured in the same battle.

Via POW camps in Libya and Italy and Stalag 4B, Hiley ended up working in the town council's public baths in Bad Schmiedeberg, a comparatively 'cushy number', in 1943-45.

Avey, via Italy, went to E 715. My father ended up working at a brick works in Bad Schmeideberg in the same small work camp as Hiley. But at least one of his 16th DLI colleagues, Pte Ronnie Hamilton, captured in the same Tunisian battle in March 1943, went to E 715--see these photograph and documents:

http://16dli.awardspace.co.uk/page292.html

That double contrast exemplifies the role of chance and fate in the life of a POW: soldiers turned slaves, they were all near-powerless pawns in a huge murderous game that was so much bigger than any of them. Avey sucinctly gets to the heart of the difference between the British POWs and the Jewish inmates in the Auschwitz labour complex: