William "Jock" Connell
British Army Pioneer Corps
from:125 Round Street, Bradford
My grandfather William Connell would not tell me about his war experiences when I asked as a child growing up in NZ but in my early twenties I went to London for several years and he came over and stayed with me and talked quite freely when I asked.
He was captured at Dunkirk and had to walk to Poland, I do not know where in Poland. He ended up at Hohenfels Stalag 383 in Bavaria. He did escape but was recaptured, making it as far as Amsterdam on one occasion only to be turned in to the Germans by a civilian he contacted by mistake. He was missing a forefinger on one of his hands and he always told us the Germans shot it off but he told me he cut it in camp and he ended up with gangrene, his arm was affected and he thought he would lose it. In the end though he had only the finger amputated.
Before the war he worked building tunnels in the UK, not wanting to disclose this he said he had been a barber and ended up cutting hair in the camp. At the end of the war he was on a march away from the camp further into Germany when American forces caught up with them. There were other things he told me about that I do not want to talk about here. He suffered from malnutrition as they all did.
