An Ordinary War

When I was a boy – like a lot of boys my age in the 60s – I was a devotee of POW books and films. The Wooden Horse. The Colditz Story. Albert RN. And the granddaddy of them all: The Great Escape. (Not to mention all the rousing battle films of the 50s celebrating that fighting British spirit.) It all looked like such fun.

Making civilian clothes out of army blankets. Radios out of tin cups. Forging identity cards and planning escapes by hiding in a vaulting horse. Getting one over on the Hun.

Here’s a book to knock all that on the head. A fictional account – inspired by the real experiences of the author’s father – of a British soldier taken prisoner by the German army in 1940, before he could escape from Dunkerque. And who then spent the rest of the war in various POW camps in Poland. Some harsh and brutal. Others less so: nine months’ work on a farm far from the fighting, where food was plentiful and the work rewarding. But which all finished as the end of the war approached and the Germans marched their prisoners west in the worst of a freezing winter.

This is not the excitement of all those POW films, where the stories hinge on the drama of escape. This is the drama of everyday life in a world of capture. Boredom. Hunger. Cold. Uniforms riddled with lice. Learning to steal and to look out for number one. Just getting through the days and finding ways to survive. And then that final, bitter march through the freezing snow and old friends dropping out one by one, never to be seen or heard from again.

All these experiences are captured vividly, yet without a trace of melodrama. These are ordinary people making the best of a dreadful situation. It’s a look at war we rarely see or read. 

And it’s absolutely riveting.