About Ronnie Howson
Ronnie Howson was born on 15th April 1919 to Ernest and Mary Howson.
He started school at Westmoor aged 5 years and then moved on to Elementary School. He left school at 14 years and started work as a cemetery assistant at Longbenton Cemetery.
He was called up on October 1939, aged 20. He survived Dunkirk but was taken prisoner in Libya in June 1942. After an unsuccessful escape attempt he was taken to Southern Germany until May 1945.
On leaving the army in 1946, he worked in Prudhoe, having married a Prudhoe girl (Mary Heron ex WAAF 1942-1946). They had one daughter and two grandchildren.
After a variety of jobs he worked for the last fifteen years as a cemetery chargehand at Prudhoe until his retirement in 1984.
He is now a widower and his spare time is taken up with gardening and reading.
(Editor’s note: as this document has been in the archives since 2007 and was not digitised until 2016, this statement is now out of date. The current situation is not known.)
War Memories of Mr Ronnie Howson of Prudhoe – ex 4th Battalion Green Howards Regiment.
I was called up at twenty under the National Emergency in October in 1939 (having previously registered in 1938 under the Militia Scheme of six month’s service then back to the job you left) and was sent to Richmond, North Yorkshire, firing on the ranges, route marches, etc.
Following this I was sent to a holding unit to await embarkation to the British Expeditionary Force in France. We sailed on 12th March 1940 for Cherbourg then up to our base camp at Rouen. Here we were always hungry, our breakfast consisting of one slice of bread and a small piece of bacon (at night we spent our pay on egg and chips). Pay was 1/6d per day (7 1/2d), 10/6d per week. Married men had to allot 5/- (25p) per week home. Money exchange was 100 francs to one English pound.
At Rouen we had to build a tented camp for the new arrivals. Eventually we were posted to our battalions that were T.A. (mine was the 4th Battalion, Green Ho wards Regiment, part of the 150 Brigade 50th Division). We were based in the small town of Wavrin, ten miles or so south east of Lille. Every day we were sent to dig anti tank traps on the Belgian border before the German army had started to invade Belgium.
On 16th May we were rushed up to a place called Ath near Arras where we had our first casualty, a 2nd lieutenant. This was the first time we had been under fire and it was pretty scary.
We then moved again north to Ypres (Menin Gate). Our sappers blew the main road at Menin after we left. We lost some lads here as well. We then had to retreat to Vimy Ridge (scene of 1st World War fighting by the Canadians). We had to retire again after twelve hours; again we lost a few lads and had to leave our wounded. We did a rearguard action to allow the bulk of the troops to reach the coast and we arrived at Dunkirk about 1st June. The whole place was on fire. We tried to board a Royal Navy ship on 2nd June; we failed and were told to try the next day. Eventually we got off at the second attempt (apart from a few Free French we were really the last ones to leave). The Gunman army was only hours away from the town so we were lucky. We lost a dozen or so lads with the shelling and the dive-bombers.
We were in a sorry state getting to Folkestone (like everybody else!). I mention Dunkirk because it was sheer hell. I’m not ashamed to say that we prayed at times.
After that we had 72 hours compassionate leave then started refitting and retraining at Blandford. We did coastal defence at Weymouth, then moved to Weston super Mare for intense training on Exmoor, which nearly killed us as it was mid winter! We were made up to strength with the Yorks and Lancs Regiment. Funnily enough most of them were Cockneys. We didn’t get on with them at first.
We were given embarkation leave for the Middle East but as Lord Haw-Haw broadcast on the wireless our exact date of sailing it was postponed. This was Christmas 1940 (Lord Haw-Haw was the name given to William Joyce, an English traitor who sided with the Germans and broadcast propaganda speeches to demoralise the English troops. He was hanged for treason after the war.)
We did go the following April. It took the convoy six months to cross the Atlantic from the Clyde, up towards Ireland, over towards Canada, hack to the west coast of Africa to Sierra Leone, round the Cape to Durban. After a few days we were off to Egypt, to Port Tewfick. We went up to an RAF airfield at Fuka to acclimatise and guard the few fighter-bombers there. They had to hide these planes at night as they were constantly strafed. One N.C.O. and six men had to travel with the planes, one man to each plane, and we had to act as rear gunners (we didn’t have a parachute) and they would travel a hundred miles or so to hide the planes in the sand dunes till next morning and we would cone back to the air base. We must have been mad, but thought nothing of it.
A destroyer, H.M.S. Abdiel, rushed us over to Cyprus as it seems that after Crete had fallen Cyprus would be the next target. We were there about three or four months then sent to Haifa in Palestine where we trained on Mount Carmel. After a while we were rushed hack over the Suez Canal to Libya after Rommel had made a move in North Africa in November 1941. We had to fight a rearguard action after Rommel chased the Australians out of Benghazi and our unit had to retire to the Gazala Line which ran from near Tobruk southwards into the desert and we bad to form defensive ‘boxes’. We had the Free French at the southernmost point, then the 150th Brigade, the 69th Brigade and the 151st Brigade behind us. After that everything quietened down. We used to go out on the Jock columns to test the enemy, an armored car, an artillery piece, engineers, and a company of infantry and did night patrols to try to get prisoners hack from their positions. These forays lasted five days and then we would be relieved. We managed to get one prisoner. The C.O. had offered a bottle of whiskey and first on the leave roster for bringing in one prisoner. (Ours was a little Austrian). The idea was to get information as to their strength etc. A few of us got leave in Alexandria which was spoiled by us not having much money so we were glad to get back. It sounds daft but that’s how it was.
I got back to the news that my mother had passed away three months earlier.
Then Rommel started to move against our positions. It started at the end of May 1942. In no time at all he had us surrounded by pushing through between our defence ‘boxes’ as they were called. He had Stuka dive-bombers, heavy artillery and tanks galore. We were pounded day and night for five days but eventually he over-ran our positions at 7 o’clock one morning with Panzer troops of the l5/21st Division. That was the end of our war, 3rd June 1942. They actually apologised for having to hand all prisoners over to the Italians because Libya was their territory. The Germans hated them; reckoned that they were a 10th rate nation. After three days in the area we were taken by road towards Tripoli. It was a real hell camp. It was called Swanni-Ben-Adam, a few miles south of Tripoli near a place called Homs. A lot of the guards were Senussi, a local tribe drafted into the Libyan Army. They were swine. We saw things happen, even a deliberate murder, which we reported to the Authorities on our -release at the end of the war and they refused to believe that the camp ever existed. We saw a different side to the eye, ties to what most people think they are. After a while we were moved out to Tripoli harbour where we had to board an Italian coal boat, battened down in rat infested hatches and were only allowed on deck a few at a time for visits to the makeshift toilets. The Italians wee too scared stiff to leave the North African coast because a few of our aircraft and submarines were in the Mediterranean, although the Germans and Italians controlled it then. On the way over our own planes strafed us, and the Italian crew, including the Captain, disappeared from the decks. If there had been anyone fit enough, I’m sure that we could have taken over the ship, although where we could have gone is anybody’s guess, but we were pretty desperate then and we were praying to be intercepted by our own side.
We docked at Naples. SS guards policed the docks. The International Red Cross wanted to come aboard to inspect conditions but they were ignored. There were wounded people aboard who had not even had their bandages changed.
We finished up at a holding camp north of Naples, at Capua, in a terrible state but at least there was running water. We had to exist on a small bun and watery soup once a day and they even had the cheek to make us sign POW cards to say that we were well cared for. Whether these cards arrived home we never knew. Later we were moved to a camp north east of Rome, at the foothills of the Apennines, called ‘Fara Sabena’. It was a tented area with a massive pit crossed by planks for toilets. It stank.
While we were here the marshaling yards outside Rome were bombed and as well as explosives our lot dropped leaflets explaining what they were doing and trying to get the Italians on our side. How we knew about this was because some of the leaflets fluttered into the camp, which was miles away from Rome.
There were quite a few notables in the camp. One was the former fly – or bantamweight World Champion in 1936, by the name of Tony Marino. We verified this later – apparently he had been chauffeur to some general and captured in the desert. There were also two South African champions. One was a jockey called Roberts (I often wondered if he was the grandfather of the Roberts who rode over here). The other was a champion wrestler. All of these blokes had volunteered to join the South African army.
Work was optional; we refused but some volunteered and went out to the local farms. The food barely kept us alive. Had it not been for the occasional Red Cross parcel we wouldn’t have survived. Parcels had about twenty items but had to be shared between ten men at first. Everything was punctured to stop hoarding for escapes, so oily sardines ran into condensed milk etc. so they had to be eaten straight away. Most people think that the Italians are a happy musical kind people. Believe me, when they thought that they had the upper hand they could be cruel in a subtle kind of way. I’ve even tried telling that to priests but they don’t believe it.
Fifty cigarettes would be with each parcel so they soon became currency. We would barter with the guards, so many cigarettes for one or two loaves. As parcels got more regular we had more stuff to exchange. In each parcel were a 2 oz. pack of tea and a tin of cocoa. We would brew the tea, dry the leaves after use, put them back in the packet and throw it over the wire to the guards. They would sniff it, give the thumbs up and throw back the bread. With the cocoa we could have poisoned them. We would crush red bricks which were lying about, into a fine powder, keep the packet inside the tin and ¼ fill with the fine dust then top the dust up with real cocoa, put it carefully hack into the tin, seal it somehow and do a deal with the guards for maybe three or four loaves. As soon as we got the bread we disappeared. They must have been naive. Once we ran out of tea leaves and threw a genuine packet of tea. They sniffed it and threw it back!
One day in September 1943 some planes flew over the camp very low. It turned out that they were German airborne troops to land at an airfield near Rome trying to prevent the King of Italy and the Top Brass of the army from leaving to surrender to the Allies in the South but they were too late. Italy was to capitulate and was immediately taken over by the German Army. Some of the guards surrounded the Germans and brought them into our camp but some of the Italians had a Fascist element and the guards had no option but to release the airborne Germans. In the confusion the prisoners burst out of the camp and some of us made for the hills, which turned out to be the Apennines. The intention was to travel South to meet up with the Allies who were rumoured to have invaded the toe of Italy, but this was not true. However, we made slow progress. There were about twelve of us. We lived on what we could scrounge from the local villages (mostly women because all able bodied men were in the forces). They were great giving us what they could spare but were terrified the Germans would find out they had helped us. A patrol used to visit the village at intervals on motorbikes.
We used a well in the valley to fill our water bottles in the early morning. Two or three of us would collect water for the group. We got to know the local shepherd and his son who used the water pond for their sheep. One morning we went as usual for the water. The sheep were there but there was no sign of the shepherd. One bloke sat facing away from us with a British greatcoat over his shoulders. We ignored him. He suddenly swung round (his uniform was all blood at the front) holding a Luger. He was a German airborne officer, spoke pretty good English and shouted for us to put up our hands. We asked where the shepherd and his son were. He pointed to a spot a distance away and said that they had refused to give our positions away so he had killed them in cold blood. We called him every name under the sun and asked him what he thought he could do on his own. We were bluffing him really. He whistled and in seconds his men came out of the undergrowth and surrounded us. They took a few more stragglers nearby and marched us up the hill to the village gaol. As we went through the crowd we told everybody to ignore the civilians as Jerry wanted to know who had given us help; otherwise they would probably have been shot too. We had to wait crammed in one cell till they collected enough escapees to fill a couple of trucks, then took us miles to some lake surrounded by mountains. I think it must have been a Fascist seaplane base (I have never been able to find out its name). While we were here a lorry load of black South Africans arrived. They had been drivers for the army and had been captured in North Africa. As soon as they drove in the SS guards ordered us to stop work (we were supposed to be building our own compound) and said that “the black b… .s would take over now.” The C.O., an SS major, English educated, knew London well, told us that he hoped to see as again in better circumstances. He put us in cattle trucks, after a meal his cooks had made, and said that the train journey would be five days to a camp in Germany. We were never allowed out of those trucks. A couple of blokes dropped through the trucks alter making a small hole in the floor; what happened to them is anybody’s guess. (There was a film made about prisoners making a similar escape from a wagon and I sometimes wondered if they got the idea from that).
We arrived at a station in Austria, over the border from Italy, by the name of Spittal, speIt the same as Spittal near Berwick. This was the base for the Mountain Army Unit with mules for transport. The mules were treated like V.I.Ps.
Eventually, we were sent to a permanent camp by train, to a place called St Marian in a valley similar to the Tyne Valley. (No one ever made a successful escape from here as there were five borders to cross). We were to build a munitions factory for Crupp von Boleyn. It was forced labour with twelve-hour shifts. Conditions were a small improvement, soup and one black bread loaf between ten men, but we could keep clean and had a fairly regular supply of Red Cross parcels, one between two men with fifty cigarettes. Again, one thousand men in a camp, ten huts, one hundred men to a hut. Every country in the Commonwealth was represented, English, New Zealanders, South Africans, Welsh and Scots. We later formed an International Football League. We had a field to play on our day off, Sundays.
Like everywhere blokes cut their own throats when it came to work. We had to dig the foundations for the factory first off. We went out in working parties in different shifts. We each had a work token with our number on it. At the beginning of the shift you gave the token to the foreman; at the end of the shift the token was handed back. They started us off to dig one third of a cubic metre per man. For us that were a doddle, for those not used to it it was harder. Soon some of the blokes finished their stint early, went straight to the foreman who handed back their tokens and went back to camp instead of making it last a bit longer. Soon the foreman got wise, doubled the shift, then trebled it. By the time the job was finished, we were digging 3 1/3 cubic metres per man per shift; it couldn’t be done, whatever the depth of the trench. So much for sticking together! We then started to sabotage at every chance. On night shift there weren’t the bosses about, only the foreman. When he gave us our tasks the floodlights couldn’t be everywhere so we would dig the ends of the trench out, leave a bit, dig the centre out, leave the middle bit, so before it got too light we’d get the foreman out, he would measure where we took him, the end and the centre, give us our tokens back and we would go hack to camp. He was none the wiser because his relief foreman would take over.
That was only the start.
When it came to concreting we would start with ninety mixes per shift, that was mix and transport by bogey to shuttered timbers. They wouldn’t trust us to drive the mixer so we had a French civilian prisoner to do that job (we soon had him on our side!). We had a peg hoard to count the mixings so when nobody was looking we’d move the pegs up the board so we were only doing about seventy mixings instead of ninety. Once the concrete was poured they couldn’t tell the difference. The bosses decided to up the mixings to one hundred and twenty so we did the same stunt with the board and actually only did ninety mixings. It all added up and delayed the work. Then we started to mix the concrete only sand and gravel. When the shutterings came off about two weeks later it just trickled out. For good measure we added picks and shovels, anything that was lying about. Of course the shutterings were massive so when it was stripped off nothing could be seen, but they were very short of tools. One night we even tipped a full skip with the concrete. We did this by getting up full speed on the track and we couldn’t stop it after it hit the end of the barrier. They never found out, except that they were a skip short.
The winters were severe and we didn’t have the constitutions to handle it, being half starved and run down. Everybody had boils or carbuncles. Personally I had twenty-four boils in twelve months, all in awkward places like the knees and neck, plus 1 was going about with double pneumonia which I didn’t know about until one day I fell off my top bunk and woke up in the medical centre. A person had to be half dead before they would excuse you duties.
The cheekiest stunt ever pulled was when our Camp Leader, an R.S.M., was allowed out, under escort, to visit smaller camps. He reckoned that he knew where he could get a wireless set for one thousand cigarettes. He got just one cig per man and off he went. He came back at dusk carrying a parcel. He had to stop to be searched so he coolly handed the parcel to his guard while he was being searched. The gate guard frisked him, opened the gate and the R.S.M. let the guard carry the parcel in then took it off him when he was in the camp. Only three people knew where it was hidden, the R.S.M., an interpreter and a shorthand typist. After the foundations of the factory were finished the steelwork was put into place and the electric wiring etc. was started. They tried to get us up to the top to act as labourers to the electricians but we used to tell them to send the foreigners (civilian prisoners) up. We were getting very cocky about that time as we had an idea that the war was going the Allies’ way.
A bulletin was read out every night about the way the war was going. We had a look-out at each door of the hut and they sneaked around every hut and read everybody the news. The powers that be must have got wind of what was going on because one morning at 5 a.m. we were ordered outside to find that the Gestapo had arrived in a convoy of three big cars. They were just like you see them on films, long leather coats, trilby hats, etc. all with lugers. They searched every hut and trashed them and started on every prisoner outside, one thousand men. If they found a photo of a wife or girlfriend or even a sister they would swear blind that they were German contacts. I would say that we were standing about seventeen hours before they left.
During the last six months in this camp our Red Cross parcels ceased completely and all we had was soup, just a few beetroot leaves floating about in some water, and a small black loaf among ten men. We were so weak that you would be dizzy when you stood up. The tale was that Eisenhower had ordered all rail transport to be attacked regardless of what it was so the Germans blamed this for lack of parcels. Our Camp Leader (the R.S.M. who got the radio) was approached about getting a message to the International Red Cross, which we thought he could do under the Geneva Convention, regarding our working conditions that were well nigh impossible, and we were as weak as water and we wanted something done about it. One of the prisoners lost his life through neglect; he had been suffocated at the bottom of a trench that collapsed without any support. One day, a delegation arrived, three men (Swedish I think). The R.S.M. put our case to them as we had refused point blank to work. They advised us to do a little bit (however slowly we moved) then the Germans couldn’t make out a case of revolt. They also let slip (out of earshot of the Germans) that the war was beginning to crumble and asked us to have a bit more patience.
One night there was a heavy air raid by our planes, about twenty kilometers away. The camp guards came to every hut with a sob story, appealing to our British sense of humanity to volunteer to help with the injured civilians and search for bodies. Quite a few of us went, if only to see the outside world. When we got there it was a rail junction that had had a direct hit and smashed the main railway to the Eastern front. We were ordered to start repairs under guard of the S.A. Brownshirts (real so and sos). When it got light a few of us slipped away to nearby houses that had been damaged. We scrounged a few spuds etc. from the pantries, stuffed them in our inside pockets and got back to the junction. We were made to empty our pockets. Some of the idiots had pinched knives, forks etc. Straight off we were on a charge as looters and were put on a train to Wolfsburg. We never saw our original camp again.
We landed at the main camp, Wolfsburg, and put on a so-called Court Martial. The trial was a farce. We had a German junior officer to defend us. He put words into our mouths and all we had to do was to agree with him (such as the spuds were taken because we thought that they were no use to anyone else). Had the war not been going our way I think that we would have been shot. Anyway, they didn’t think that the case was that serious and we were cleared. As it happens this was the best move we had made because the camp was stockpiled with Red Cross parcels. The parcels couldn’t be sent to the smaller camps because Allied fighter-bombers had all the roads and railways covered. Anything that moved was either shot at or bombed. So we gorged ourselves, made ourselves sick even.
The order came one day to evacuate the camp. We had four x 10lb parcels each and had to go on a one hundred and forty mile march in deep snow. The rumour was that we were to be used as a human shield in front of six S.S. divisions holding out in a Bavarian redoubt. So we had to march ten miles a day for fourteen days to a place called Mak’t Pongo. When we got there we discovered a massive camp full of POWs and a Russian compound next door. We were in a mess but they were worse. We heard that typhoid had started among them so twelve of us decided to get out (we had watched the Jerry wagon parked outside the fence for carrying odds and ends). Before we got out rumour was rife that a Red Cross delegate had taken a V.I.P. from the camp, reckoned to he Lord Lascelles, a cousin of the Queen, later to be Earl of Harewood. The English prisoners were up in arms about this because there were many more needy cases that should have had preference, such a wounded men, but they didn’t have the influence. However we seized the chance to get under the wire one night and got into the back of the truck. A little Aussie was the driver after we managed to get out. We met up at 3 a.m. with the advancing Americans who were on their way to take the surrender of the S.S. who were reckoned to have thought twice before making a stand. The Yanks sent us back with a covering note to their Headquarters where we were fed and sent on.
We eventually made our way to the Berchesgartern (Hitler’s mountain retreat). It was held by the American 101st Airborne Division, who treated us like heroes. We stayed there for a few days, fed on the best, but were told that we would have to go. Apparently Eisenhower was about to visit the place and all the POWs were supposed to make for the nearest airfield for repatriation. We swapped the wagon for a big Mercedes, got an officer’s signature to get petrol at any of their dumps so we had a good run-about for a week until the jaunt was stopped by British M.Ps as soon as we reached a town called Ulm in the British sector. They confiscated the car and we had to wait in a nearby barracks until they rounded up some more stragglers and took us by wagon to Brussels, in Belgium for repatriation. Apparently Ulm was the hometown of General Rommel and he had been buried there after he had been forced to either commit suicide or be shot for his part in the alleged plot in the Hitler bomb affair. His son, Erwin, who had been young at the lime, later became Mayor of Ulm.
Eventually we were flown out in Halifax bombers, a few in each plane, standing in the corridors. We landed at Luton airport, deloused, showered and debriefed arid sent to a camp in Buckingharnshire where we started to re-train after home leave.
We were given three months leave on double rations but on discharge given a medical and most of us were declared Al which was a bad of ‘bull’ because we all had after effects – but that’s another matter.
As a matter of fact I can still recall my P.O.W. number. It was 8413.