Pte. Thomas Vincent Lee
British Army Auxiliary Military Pioneer Corps
from:Dublin
My father Tommy Lee was born and brought up in Dublin. He was a proud Irishman who joined the British Army at some point in 1939.
I know that 10 days after his 20th birthday on 23rd November 1939 he was in France with the Pioneer Corp and was captured at Boulogne on 26th May 1940. They were waiting to be repatriated by boat but Dad swapped places with another man who was desperate to get home (apparently he'd had a Dear John letter) and so Dad ended up at the HQ waiting for an officer to reply to orders when the boats left without them and the Germans marched into the town the following day.
A German solider told him "the war is over for you Tommy" and Dad grinned and thought jokingly how does he know my name, the German looked perplexed apparently. He was marched across France up into Belgium and back down across Germany. He was kept in one prison camp early on and then moved to Stalag III D until the end of the war as PoW No. 6292.
As children Dad never talked about the war but as we his 5 children grow older he would share stories, for instance I happened to say I went on a day trip to Boulogne and he told me that was where he had been captured and the events surrounding it. Peeling potatoes one day earned me a rebuke, the Germans would have shot me for the chip sized peelings I'd made, but lead to the story of how he hurt is ankle playing football and got a few days light duties peeling spuds in the kitchen. He obviously preferred it and changed the end date on his doctors note several times until he was rumbled and thrown into solitary confinement for a period.
He explained how the camp was near a railway station and one of is duties was to unload Red Cross parcels. On occasions the guards would disappear for a short time and this was the prisoners cue to help themselves. He said there were good and bad amongst the Germans and he never held a grudge or spoke about them with any malice. In fact he went on to learn German, read copious amount of German books - so many that the local library had to restock for him and visited Germany and the site of the camp - now I believe an academy or school.
He recalled seeing parachutists being picked off in the sky and being unable to do anything as they fell outside the camp boundaries and Berlin being bombed and the glow of the fires. His saddest recollection was the young German secretaries in the Red Cross office who were still there after the German guards abandoned the camp. They were terrified of the Russian's arrival, they knew how harshly the Russian prisoners had been treated and they feared retribution. They had shown Dad that they had cyanide pills sewn into their clothes and were prepared to take them. He and others begged them not to do it but he never saw them again and said he heard later they did take their own lives and he felt that was the greatest waste of life.
Obviously, my grandmother knew he had been taken prisoner but also had the painful experience of Lord Haw Haw reading out his name and saying the British were sacrificing the young boys of Ireland for their cause.
Just as an aside with my dad in the British Army and his brother James a GI, my Uncle Frankie their youngest brother inquired at the Irish Army recruitment office about joining up. When my grandmother found out she frogmarched him back, dumped the papers on the desk and told the officer "I have one son in the British Army and one in the US Army and you are not having him!!"
