Wartime memories uncovered in journal written by prisoner of war (From Durham Times)

Wartime memories uncovered in journal written by prisoner of war

2:59pm Friday 25th September 2009

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Seventy years after the outbreak of the Second World War, the memoirs of a North-East soldier have come to light. Robert Henderson spent five years as a prisoner of war after he was captured by the Nazis. Gavin Havery met his son and took a look at the past.

WHEN Neville Chamberlain made his now famous declaration of war with Germany Roy Henderson was a fouryear- old boy.

His 37-year-old father worked down the pit as a miner but spent the weekends training with the Territorial Army.

So when British forces were called upon to stop Adolf Hitler’s war machine marching across Europe, Sgt Robert Henderson’s weaponry skills were needed.

He left his wife, Elizabeth, and their three sons and was posted to northern France where he saw action with enemy forces in May 1940.

In his journal, entitled I Was There, he wrote: “I scrambled through the hedge and had crawled about 20 yards when I got my first sight of the Jerries.

“A party of them had just managed to surprise and capture one of our small groups further down the road and they were almost between me and my own group.

“I had no time to think about it, I just began firing as rapidly at everything dressed in field grey, my group were doing the same thing, then I darted back and rejoined them. I have never been so bloody frightened and mad at the same time.”

After three hungry days hiding on a farm near the border of Belgium, Sgt Henderson was captured by German soldiers who almost ran over him in a tank.

His journal tells how their captor gave him and another British soldier a cigarette before informing them of their fate.

“He said in fairly good English ‘For you, the war is over’.

“It certainly was. We were POWs.”

Sgt Henderson spent five years in prison and work camps in Poland and Bavaria while his family in Houghtonle- Spring struggled to get by on wartime rations.

To pass the time, prisoners made gardens to grow vegetables, organised football games and put on shows such as Dick Whittington, The Mikado and wrote their own plays.

Sgt Henderson sketched some of the prisons he was kept at and wrote poetry about his wartime experiences.

They have been kept in an album along with a wide selection of photographs from his days in captivity that his son, Roy, from Carrville, who also served with Durham Light Infanty, plans to submit to the military archives at County Hall in Durham.

He said: “He talked about what happened to him very little when he got back but this is his record of his experiences.”

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