Pte. George James Elijah Butler
British Army East Kent Regiment
My father, Private George James Elijah Butler served with the East Kent Regiment (The Buffs. He was captured in Belgium in 1940 and sent to POW Camp Stalag XXA13. His prisoner number was 12556. In WW2 my father, along with a great many others, was a part of the British Expeditionary Forces that was sent to Belgium to fight the Germans. He was in the Royal East Kent Regiment (The Buffs). His battalion was 20 men over strength making it 1020 men in all.
He told me that he didn't have a tin hat - he only had a beret - and his mate had a tin hat but didn't like it, so they swapped. He went on to say that this helped to save his life, because shrapnel hit the tin hat and made a hole in it. He also was saved by his tin mug and tin plate in his kit bag because they stopped a spent bullet that hit the kit bag. They were sent over to Belgium without adequate weapons or supplies to be able fight the Germans. As a result, 1000 men lost their lives. At the end of the battle the twenty who were left were ordered to surrender. He was captured before the fall of Dunkirk. When he was captured he, along with a great number of others, was paraded in a large sports stadium. They were being paraded in front of Adolf Hitler and other top Nazis. I remember my father telling me that a German guard told him to stand to attention. He told me the answer he gave the guard and it's a wonder he wasn't shot by the guard.
He was force-marched into Poland via Holland with many other British troops. He ended up in Stalag XXA13 in Poland. He made three escape attempts, but did not make a home run. On one of the escape attempts he and some of his mates removed some iron bars which were set into a frame that was set into the stone work of a window that overlooked a road and climbed out straight on to the road. Their mates then put the iron bars back in place. They were all recaptured. After they came out of solitary he was told by his friends that the SS came to try to find out how they manage to escape. His mates told him that the SS officer reached up and pulled on the iron bars and the bars gave way and fell on top of him. My father told me that he wished he hadn't escaped that time, because he would have loved to seen the bars fall on the SS officer. During another escape they removed a large stone block from the wall which was replaced by their mates once they had made their escape.
Another of the escapes was when he was working on a farm. The German sergeant pulled out his gun and told all the prisoners that he would shoot anybody that tried to escape while he was in charge. My father told me that became a challenge to him and his mate. So they both did a bunk as soon as the guard's back was turned. They were both recaptured by the Polish police and were held at the police station until they could be escorted back to the prison camp. The guard who came to escort them back to the prison camp was the same sergeant who had said he would shoot anyone that escaped while he was in charge. So my father and his mate told the Polish police officer that if they went back with that sergeant he would shoot them before they got back to the camp and they told him what the German sergeant had said to them. So the Polish police officer phoned the prison camp and asked for a German officer to come and escort them back to the camp because the sergeant has told the prisoners that he intended to shoot them.
On one of my father's escapes he was put in a concentration camp when he was recaptured until the camp guards could come and pick him up to escort him back to the prison camp. He told me how he was put to work on a farm and that the farmer's son was trying to shoot crows for food and that he wasn't a very good shot, so my dad persuaded the farmer's son to let him have the gun to shoot the crows for him. So my father ended up shooting the crows. It was a good job that there were no German guards about at the time. My father was a marksman with a rifle and Bren gun.
The atrocities he saw I cannot put here - there were many of them. He suffered all his life with bad health because of being a POW. He had nightmares most of his life because of what he had seen. He also survived a 600 mile death march.
I am now trying to find out as much as I can about his service record because when he was alive he would not tell me as much as I would have liked him to.
