Arts / Shetlander’s story of Nazi capture and Red Cross assistance highlighted in new book
THE WORK of the Red Cross in safeguarding prisoners of war was commemorated at the Shetland Library on Thursday evening at the launch of Dr Jonathan Wills’ new book.
Uncle Davie’s Red Cross Blanket tells the story of the writer’s Scalloway-born uncle, Private Davie Slater of the Gordon Highlanders, who was among those taken prisoner by the Nazi General Erwin Rommel at St Valéry, France, in June 1940.
Slater and 18 other young Shetland soldiers were with the 51st Highland Division, fighting a rearguard action to protect Allied troops trying to escape from western French ports in the days after the Dunkirk evacuation.
After a gruelling three-week march through France and Belgium, the 10,000 prisoners were shipped up the Rhine on coal barges into Germany and then sent in cattle trucks to various camps.
Slater ended up at Stalag XXA in Toruń, in Poland, where he worked on farms for four-and-a-half years until January 1945, when the guards marched their prisoners back to Germany through the snow, with the vengeful Soviet Red Army on their heels.
Somehow Slater and his boyhood friends John W. J. Smith of Scalloway and Duncan Houston of Veensgarth, Tingwall, made it back to British Army lines a few days after the German surrender in May 1945.
The 320-page book, illustrated with photographs and maps, is based on over 200 letters and postcards that Slater sent home from Stalag XXA.
It also includes letters from his father, Jack Slater, and sister Nina at Myrtle Cottage, Scalloway; Red Cross reports held in the National Archives at Kew; and regimental records of the Gordon Highlanders, including the 5th Battalion’s war diary from January to May 1940.
In his library talk, Dr Wills described the regular inspections of the prison camps by the Swiss Red Cross under the Geneva Convention, which undoubtedly prevented conditions becoming even worse than they were.
He noted that without the Red Cross food parcels sent to the camps many more prisoners would have died.
“Sadly, the Red Cross is still having to do such work in today’s conflicts,” he said, “so I think it’s important to remind younger folk that unless we know our history we may end up repeating it.”
A Red Cross collection tin at the entrance raised £117 to help the organisation’s continuing good works.
Uncle Davie’s Red Cross Blanket is published independently by Jonathan Wills, trading as Bressabooks, priced at £20 (paperback) and £25 (hardcover).
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