205828 2nd Lt. Peter Hubert Mosenthal British Army 1st Btn. Ox and Bucks Light Infantry from:Maidenhead My grandfather, Peter Mosenthal, served with the TA Battalion (1 Bucks I believe) in France in 1940. He was captured in Hazebrouk on 27 May. His company had been holed up in a farmhouse which was surrounded by German infantry and armoured cars. They had fought for a number of hours before the farm house took a direct hit from a mortar and was burning fiercely. The cellar by this stage had been filled with wounded who would perish if not evacuated. The remaining men had no choice but to surrender. He had been lightly wounded and the German medics put his arm in a sling. He was part of a group that was force-marched to trains in Germany, but a young German officer saw his rank and arm in a sling and gave him a lift to the train in his Kubelwagen. He was sent to an Oflag 7C in Laufen, on the border between Germany and Austria. The prison building is now luxury flats which I visited when by coincidence when I was an exchange student in the town. He subsequently moved to various camps in Poland and suffered increasing deprivations. He was liberated by American forces on 30 April 1945 and flown back to England, but not until after he had been in charge of guarding German prisoners in early May. He had been on some fairly horrendous forced marches from Poland to Ingolstadt as the Germans emptied the camps in Poland from the advancing Soviets. Very sadly his column was strafed by the US Air Force which mistook their 1940 battledress uniform as Hungarian. A lot of prisoners were killed.
I have photos of the farmhouse where his company was captured, taken when he visited Hazebrouk in 1946. The burnt out shells of the trucks in which they arrived on the 26th of May and which were destroyed in the fighting on 27th of May were still there. He also told me of the Battalion Adjutant going off to recce the forward elements of the Wehrmacht advance and never being seen again. On or around the 25th of May his platoon were in trenches when the German recce infantry were spotted. His platoon still had 12 inch WW1 bayonets which he ordered to be fixed. All the Germans could see were the bayonets glinting from the top of the trenches and they ran away as fast as possible. They did not shoot the fleeing Germans as it was regarded as ungentlemanly. The battalion was neither equipped nor trained to fight German armour and was effectively destroyed. His only armour training had been a battalion exercise on Newbury racecourse in December 1939 where cyclists with flags represented German tanks!
He had had to temporarily change his name to Morten in 1939 at the Army's request, for his name was German Jewish, although he was Christian. This was lucky in view of the fate of his company.
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