Blitz Kids (39 page)

As they climbed up rope ladders on to the decks of the
Scharnhorst
, the relieved seamen were greeted by a German propaganda film crew who recorded the events. In the film it is easy to spot the fourteen and fifteen year olds among the prisoners – their bright but nervous young faces standing out from the old hands around them. Once beneath decks, John Hipkin began to think about what had happened to him. As he later recalled, it was a confusing, frightening and somewhat surreal situation: ‘I was fourteen years old – at that age it’s strange to be a prisoner onboard a German ship.’ At the same time he was able to remain youthfully optimistic about what had happened: ‘It was great. I was a fourteen year old among all these seaman. But after a while, there were about thirty or forty boys of our age – galley boys, cabin boys and so on.’

Whilst onboard, the crew of the
Lustrous
were questioned by their captors, who seemed surprised to see such young faces among the prisoners. Seventeen-year-old Lewis McMahon, who had joined the Merchant Navy as a fourteen year old, was singled out by his captors
and was spoken to by the captain of the
Scharnhorst
, Kurt Hoffman. Lewis later admitted he had told his captor ‘a pack of lies’. John Hipkin was asked his age and then taken to the galley where German sailors gave him sweets and cakes. After four days below decks, the prisoners were transferred to a German supply ship, the
Ermland
, before landing at La Pallice in France. Ironically, the camp had been built by the French in 1940 to house some of the thousands of Germans they had expected to capture. From there, the seamen were sent to a filthy transit camp before being transferred to Paris and then sent on a four-day train journey to Germany.

At first, the survivors of the
Lustrous
were sent to Sandbostel. Each morning they were woken at 6 a.m., given a breakfast of bread and water, and sent to work in the fields on twelve-hour shifts. As John Brantom later recalled, if they dared to slack, the guards beat them with sticks. John Hipkin was appalled by conditions at the camp, recalling that although the British were crammed 100 to a room, conditions for Yugoslav prisoners were even worse. It was hard to imagine such cruelty and so he would allow the Yugoslavs to dip their mugs into the British soup as he carried it between compounds. Similarly, John Brantom threw bread rations over the fence to the starving Yugoslavs. On one occasion, John Hipkin watched as a German guard took offence at seeing Yugoslavs sharing British food. He shouted to the prisoners and, as the Yugoslav ran away, the guard raised his rifle, fired and killed the man. As John Hipkin later recalled: ‘I’ll never forget that murder. All over a stinking bowl of soup.’
7

Officially, the merchant seamen were non-combatants and should have been treated as internees, not as prisoners of war. Instead, they were placed in a special camp known as Milag Nord or Marine Internierten Lager, at Westertimke near Bremen (Royal Navy personnel were imprisoned in the nearby Marlag camp). In the case of merchant seamen under the age of eighteen, international law stipulated that they could not be interned. Instead, they should be repatriated. However, these rules were seldom adhered to and so Leslie McDermott-Brown, John Hipkin, John Brantom and many other boys were transferred there from Sandbostel.

When the first batch of internees arrived in the camp they discovered that the huts had been made from damp wood that had been left out in the snow all winter. Such was the poor construction of
the huts that the wind whistled through the walls. For the incoming seamen, the first winter was a time of cold, hunger and uncertainty. As they soon learned, the loose sandy soil plagued them in the dry summers, coating their clothes in a fine layer of dust. Then, in winter, it soon grew thick and damp as it was churned up by thousands of footfalls from bored internees as they trudged around the perimeter.

Teenage merchant seamen from all parts of the British Isles ended up within the camp, meaning that they could share their time with others their own age. Also, just as most had experienced on their ships, the boys had the protection of older men who looked out for them. The boys met people from all four corners of the globe: aged mariners who had lived all their lives from port to port, fathers and sons who had sailed and been captured together, men of every imaginable nationality, race and religion. For the youngsters, it was an education just to listen to these men. They had travelled the world and their knowledge seemed infinite to teenagers fresh from home. John Brantom grew friendly with an older man, an experienced sailor who was a talented artist and was like an uncle to the teenager. He also befriended a musician who had been sunk the same day whilst crewing a separate ship. Unfortunately, the musician died of cancer and his
sixteen-year-old
friend had to dig his grave.

Despite this sense of camaraderie, at times the boys found life difficult to endure. Like all prisoners of war they often felt lonely despite living in cramped conditions amidst thousands of fellow seamen. John Hipkin wrote home requesting photographs of his family and friends, hoping they might help curb the inevitable sense of homesickness felt by all prisoners. At times John Brantom, whose teenage years were passing in captivity, considered climbing the perimeter wire and meeting an inevitable death. He regularly moved huts and found it difficult to settle amongst his countrymen. Feeling like an outsider, he spent increasing amounts of time with foreign sailors, including Jamaicans and Nigerians, who were sometimes shunned by the British sailors. For John Hipkin, the emotional turmoil of captivity was suppressed beneath a desire for education. Whilst a prisoner he became an avid student, spending many of his spare hours studying – just as many of his contemporaries were continuing their studies behind school desks across the United Kingdom.

With time, conditions slowly improved. Sailors in the adjoining Milag thought the merchant seamen were living a life of incredible freedom. There were rumours of widespread rackets, gambling syndicates, drinking and even women being smuggled into the camp. Whilst the issue of discipline among men who were interned rather than held prisoner, and who were not under military discipline, meant that life might have been easier than for their counterparts, life in Milag was far from a holiday camp existence. Although labour was not compulsory, some chose to work on local farms, which helped provide some fresh vegetables for the internees. By early 1943 there were nearly 3,000 merchant seaman interned in Milag Nord. The senior British officer in the camp recorded the former positions of the boys in his camp. He counted: seventy-four cadets; thirty-five deck boys; sixteen galley boys; fifteen cabin boys; six saloon boys; one steward’s boy; one pantry boy; one engineer’s boy; and one lift boy.
8
Red Cross reports indicated that the camp was sufficient to house them, except that the toilet facilities were substandard and there was insufficient equipment for private cooking. It was also recorded that they had just one hot shower per month. The seamen slept on straw-filled palliasses in two-tier bunks, with each man issued with two blankets. As one man wrote home: ‘these boards do get hard’.
9
In 1943 it was recorded that each internee had just one good outfit of clothes. The men also complained that parcels from home were infrequent.

In July that year, a seaman wrote home:

However, that rosy impression of life in the camp was far from the memory of others. Bill Manningham, who entered the camp aged seventeen, later recalled:

Conditions at the camp annoyed Bill and his mates: ‘We went on strike once because of the soup. We hadn’t received any parcels and the soup was just like water. We only got it once a day so we were practically starving, but the strike ended when the commandant threatened to have us all shot.’
12
Such threats were genuine. One of Leslie McDermott-Brown’s friends was shot and killed by a guard whilst attempting to trade food. With increasing numbers of cabin and galley boys falling into German hands it was decided they should all be housed together within the camp. As John Hipkin remembered it, the Germans had hoped the boys would be a good influence on each other:

John recalled the work details: ‘The work I liked most of all was the forestry gang. You would spend a whole day working in the forest with just a few guards. We were felling trees so they had to be a safe distance away. I liked that because you could kid yourself you were free.’
13

As a teenage boy, John soon grew to recognize that youth had its advantages:

With help from groups back home, including the Merchant Navy Officers’ Training Board, John Hipkin was able to restart his education. In 1944, after three years as an internee, he wrote home to his mother:

In the camp, John also studied for the RAF entrance examination, using books sent to him by the Red Cross. His mental strength was also supported by a growing religious faith which he first encountered courtesy of the teachings of a padre who had been sunk in the Atlantic.

Not all teenage prisoners of war were held captive by the Germans. Some crews of merchant ships found themselves at the mercy of neutral powers. In some cases their treatment was far worse than that given by the enemy. Born in Blackwood, Gwent, in August 1925, Wilfred Williams was the cabin boy on a merchant ship SS
Allende
. He had been working at a forge when war broke out and was upset that he could not join the Army aged fourteen. When he later saw a work colleague wearing a Merchant Navy badge he spoke with him and discovered that he was now old enough to join the Merchant Navy. He told his parents that if they did not allow him to go, he would run away to sea.

Wilfred joined the
Allende
in February 1941 aged fifteen. As a mess room boy he made breakfast each morning, did the washing up and laid the table for meals. One year on, the ship was eighteen miles off the coast of Liberia when a torpedo hit the ship. Wilfred was thrown from his bunk, hitting his head on the ceiling. When he got outside, the deck was already tilting and he could hear the cargo shifting beneath him. As he looked around the deck was littered with debris from the explosion. One man narrowly avoided being hit by a lump of the engine.

Taking to the lifeboats, the crew did their best to get away. In a heavy sea, with rain pouring down, the lifeboats soon filled with water. They tried to bail out the boat, but without buckets they could do little. Facing the prospect of being sunk, and noticing the
Allende
was still afloat, the crew decided to row back to fetch buckets. As they approached, a second torpedo struck, sending the ship to the bottom. They were forced to continue bailing out as best they could. As the seas calmed, the men in the lifeboat were able to finish bailing out and get the boat under control. However, having been soaked all night by the rain, in the morning the sun scorched them. After two days in the lifeboat, they were washed upon the coast. They attempted to row ashore, hoping they could crest a wave and be deposited on the beach. However, the lifeboat was caught by a wave: the men were thrown from it and washed up on an empty beach.

There was no sign of life in the area, with the beach acting as a narrow strip between the sea and a thick jungle. The decision was taken to walk along the beach in search of a village. After the ordeal of the sinking, most of the crew were barefoot. Wilfred Williams tore strips from his trousers and bound his feet. Eventually they reached a fishing village and discovered they were in French Guinea. The local gendarme was fetched and the crew were taken into captivity. It did not take the shipwrecked sailors long to realize the local authorities were loyal to the pro-German Vichy regime in France and were vehemently anti-British.