Prisoner of War: Captured at Anzio

This is part of an Interview with John Potter by his Grandson Sam Dudley (11):
SD: When did you get captured?

JP: That was February 1944 we were on the Anzio landing. We were all fighting up Italy and at Montecassino there was a big strong German Fortress and we couldn’t get past it. So apparently they wanted to pull away some of the German troops from Montecassino so they put in an invasion south of Rome at a place called Anzio, and we all went ashore and some of the scout (advance) troops had got as far as Rome because there was no resistance, but they had to come back because we couldn’t get the tanks and guns ashore quickly enough to hold the ground we’d got. There was a local counter-attack by the Germans. We were so thin on the ground that our Company had to cover a normal Battalion front. And they came around through and behind us. I was very lucky to get away with it. Somebody stuck a big German machine pistol in my shoulder and said ‘Come Johnny, Tommy you come.’ Actually I’d just taken over a machine pistol and I was on my hands and knees looking for magazines to put in it. And oh I was so glad it was an old German and not a young hot-head or I wouldn’t be here talking to you!
I spent the rest of the war in Bavaria.
SD: Where did you go?

JP: Into Bavaria. A big transit camp called stalag 7A and there was everybody from Russians to Yanks, Canadians, French, Poles, everybody was there. We stayed there a long, long time until eventually they sent us to an NCOs [Non-Commissioned Officer — sergeants etc] camp. When we got to that camp they had it all laid on because some of those blokes had been POWs since Dunkerque [1940] and around then and they’d got it all so organised that they’d got radios. And my first night there, there was a group of us in an empty hut with straw palliases and someone came in and said ‘who’s the senior sergeant’ so I looked around and said ‘I think it’s me’, so he said ‘well read this and pass it on to the next hut’ so I said ‘what is it?’ and he said ‘What do you think it is? It’s the six o’clock news from the BBC!’ They had short hand writers and they took it down and then they typed it up, in a prison camp and the Germans don’t know anything about it! And they made copies of it on a jelly machine and passed it round the camp. So I looked at it and it said “Another 1,000 bomber raid on Berlin” and I said what do you mean another one? It was very enlightening. After the invasion [June 1944] started the wide boys were running a book [betting] on who would get to us first, General Patten [US] or General Patch [UK]. Eventually they emptied the camp and marched us off into the hills, and one day [April 1945] the German Commandant said to our chief bloke, the C-in-C, ‘You’re on your own now’ and the German troops smashed their rifles and threw them on the duck pond and scattered, just went away and left us…
We hunted around, found farmers who would give us eggs and chickens to eat and we gave them chocolate and cigarettes and eventually the Yanks came and flew us home.

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