by Tim Jones
This is the memoir written by my father, Joseph Gordon Jones in 1989. In it he describes his experiences between 1939 and 1945 and in particular his life as a prisoner of war in Italy, Germany and Poland. He didn’t have a camera with him but I’ve added some pictures I found on the internet.
Although he was an educated man, my father was from a working-class background and he was never an officer. Accordingly, this is the War seen from the perspective of someone who did not accept the nationalistic “king and country” view which is so apparent in the films of the day and in more polished accounts by middle-class men who served as officers. This is a collection of anecdotes by a man whose main ambition was to survive, whose greatest feat of arms was to accidentally wound a horse and who, unlike his middle-class contemporaries who were prisoners of the Germans, was forced to undergo a punishing regime of forced labour. During my childhood, my father often spoke bitterly of the Geneva Convention which he called an “international officers’ conspiracy” because it was this which forbade officer prisoners from being forced to work but which condoned the ill treatment of the “other ranks”.
My father often expressed admiration for “The Good Soldier Schweyk” – the novel by Jaroslav Hasek about a Czech soldier in the First World War who succesfully avoids fighting and yet manages to stay out of trouble. He liked to see himself as a Schweykian character although in fact he never managed to avoid hardship much as he would have liked to.
My father was born in Manchester on March 31st 1918. It was Easter Sunday. The British Empire, the French Republic and the United States of America were at war with the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire. The last desperate engagement of this Great War sometimes called the Second Battle of the Somme, sometimes Ludendorff’s Last Throw, was in progress. The Soviet Union under Lenin and his Bolsheviks was less then five months old. Lloyd George was Prime Minister of a United Kingdom which still included Ireland, the Easter Rising having been suppressed two years previously. Woodrow Wilson was President of the USA and Clemenceau (“The Tiger”) of France. In China, a 25 year old librarian called Mao Tse Tung was very interested in events in Russia and in India a 46 year old lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi was beginning to organise the Congress Party. In Italy, Benito Mussolini was recovering from a war wound received in 1917 and trying out names for the political party he would found the next year. He would eventually settle on “Fascisti”. In England and for that matter in the rest of Europe, there were no televisions, no public radio broadcasts, few cars and few telephones. There were virtually no refrigerators no freezers and no central heating. There were no bras, bikinis, boxer-shorts or trainers. Mens’ shirts had detachable collars and were not buttoned up the front – they were whole garments pulled over the head. There were no plastic bags – there was no plastic. Aeroplanes had existed for 15 years but people would still run out of their houses into the street to see one fly over. Christmas Day was a working day in Scotland and would remain so until 1958. Florence Nightingale had been in her grave for eight years, Rasputin in his for two and Jimi Hendrix would not be born for a further 24 years. Wyatt Earp was still alive and there were still Thylacines in Tasmania. On the Western Front, an Austrian born German corporal named Adolf Hitler would shortly be hospitalised due to mustard gas inhalation.
That is what was happening then.
My father was the first of three children born to a bricklayer turned publican turned soldier turned bricklayer and the daughter of a publican. My grandfather had had an interesting life having had to flee the country after a drunken incident which involved a shooting and going on to fight the Matabele in one of Britain’s last colonial wars. My grandmother always claimed a royal connection as she had been born in the Queen’s Arms. My father grew up clever and two aunts paid my grandparents to allow him to stay at school until he was 18. This just didn’t happen in working-class Manchester and my grandfather choked on his beer and called my father “Shakespeare”. He must have been proud (surely?) when my father scored top marks in his Higher School Certificate exams (like A levels today) and went on to train to be a teacher. He would have preferred to be a doctor but the aunts’ money didn’t extend to university fees. So, 21 years later my father begins his career just as the German Corporal decides to save Germany from Bolshevism and International Zionism. Jimi Hendrix has still 3 years to wait to be born.