Themes
Ken McDonald
Article Highlights
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Imprisonment in Greece
Imprisonment in Greece
McDonald kept notes of his ordeal that later formed a diary of his
four years' in captivity as a prisoner of war. After the war he
re-visited his writings and added material that later became known to
him. The account is held in the Archives of the Royal Marines Museum.
Quotations used in this article originate from McDonald’s own account.
After he escaped the sinking cruiser McDonald and HMS Gloucester’s
other survivors held on to various carley floats, boats or wreckage.
Soon the shipwrecked survivors sighted two low flying aircraft dropping
flares but discovered to their horror that they were Luftwaffe
aircraft. To their relief the German aircraft soon disappeared.
The survivors spotted a small vessel in the distance
that seemed to be hesitant in picking them up. Finally to their relief
the vessel came alongside and hauled the men aboard. McDonald remembers
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‘In the euphoria of being saved, the nationality of the crew, with
their strange uniforms and unfamiliar language, did not unduly concern
us, as we gratefully accepted mugs of water and hunks of bread from
them, and it was only when we were hustled down into the forepeak of
the boat, which to our astonishment was crammed with other Gloucester
survivors, did we learn the crew were German! And then it slowly sank
into our waterlogged brains, that we were now prisoners of war!’
The German crew took the prisoners to the island of Kythra. As they
left the ship the men noticed the dead body of one of their shipmates
who had died shortly after the vessel picked them up. The surviving
crew of HMS Gloucester buried 18 year old Ordinary Seaman Kenneth
Bicknell three days later.
On 7 June McDonald and his fellow internees arrived in the Port of
Piraeus, south of Athens, Greece. McDonald remembers that ‘the
reception committee of German Military wasted no time in showing their
hostility and enforcing it with their rifle butts as we were herded
into vehicles’. The German military escorted them to a transit camp in
Corinth. McDonald’s account documents the awful conditions of the camp -
‘The conditions in this camp were appalling and the 10 000 odd British
and Commonwealth prisoners, captured in Greece, were existing in holes
dug in the sand, with no medical or toilet facilities, with a daily
food ration of a loaf of bread between ten men, a cup of ersatz coffee
and a bowl of cabbage water soup. It was no surprise that many were
showing signs of dysentery and other complaints, and we learned that
'trigger happy' guards had been responsible for numerous deaths.’
Luckily McDonald and his fellow prisoners only remained at the camp for 36
hours. They then marched to Corinth railway station where their captors
fed them a meagre meal of bread and meat paste and then crammed them
into cattle trucks. Each truck held 50 men in the most awful of
conditions for over 20 hours. Poor ventilation and the hot Greek
climate stifled the captives. The men had a bucket with drinking and a
bucket for a toilet.
After their ordeal in the cattle tracks the prisoners marched to
Salonika in North Greece with warnings that any prisoner who fell out or
tried to escape would be shot.
