See also Kingsley Brown, Bonds of Wire: A Memoir (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1989), pp. 119-120,
124.
Kingsley Brown, “Waiting Games in a PoW Camp.” Jane
Dewar, ed., True Canadian War Stories
(Toronto: Prospero Books, 1996), pp. 246, 249.
“Hear the latest, old boy? Wow! Twenty-five nurses
have just been taken prisoner. They’re on their way here now!”
It was just one more of what we called in Stalag Luft III a ‘latrine rumor,’ the
kind of phoney news dreamed up in the prison camp wash-house.
“Yeah, 25 of them, they say, right from the States.
Shot down in North Africa in a Yank Dakota. Boy, things are looking up!”
There was not, of course, one grain of truth in it,
something most of us knew the moment we heard it. In RAF vernacular, it was not
‘pukka gen.’ But it was the kind of latrine rumor we loved to hear, very definitely
the stuff of which prison camp morale was made.
There were no women in German camps for Allied PoWs
(unlike those that held Russia’s female front-line fighters!), but by some
mysterious sorcery woman’s spell drifted through the barbed wire to become a
vital component of the prisoner of war psyche.
* * *
Stories in the apocryphal category, such as that of
the shot-down nurses, included a whole repertory involving camps where Russian
women prisoners were incarcerated. One of the most popular scenarios, which
routinely went the rounds about every six months, followed an escaping Brit or
Yank who had found refuge by wriggling through the wire in to a Russian women’s
camp. Three days and nights later, he surrendered to the Germans, more dead
than alive, and was now recuperating in the camp lazarette.