213401 Pte. Gilbert Richard Naylor British Army Sherwood Foresters Last year my wife and I visited Anzio to see where her father, Gilbert Richard Naylor, had been captured during the war, and subsequently obtained his service record.
He invaded Italy at Anzio on Feb 29th and was captured on 1st Mar. 1944. He was in the Sherwood Foresters having one month earlier been transferred from the Black Watch. He spent the remainder of the war in Stalag 344 at Lamsdorf. During his time there he wrote quite a few letters home and one of them came our way quite recently. It is basically about a photo, of my wife as a 2 year old that had been sent to him, we also now have the photo which he carried with him. My mother-in-law still has all the letters but they are obviously of a personal nature and we have declined to read them.
He was in Arbeits kommandos E30 but I do not know what town it was near. All we know about his time there is that he worked on the night shift at a cement factory and on Sundays he liked to go on a walk to a nearby river because it helped with the boredom. I got the impression that this was not a high security camp as they were escorted to work but on the return had to waken the guards so as to get back into the camp. He still remembered the German language that he had learnt and had no hard feelings against the German people. He said that the locals were not much better off than the POWs but that they did give them bits of food. We think that he was on the march east in '44 but he did not talk about it. The family had a German army back pack that had deer fur on the flap, he said that he acquired it on the march, but we thought that he meant between Anzio and Lamsdorf not knowing about the march in '44.
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